I’m a “we” trapped as a “me.” I’m a significant other existing as a person without a partner. I’m a rational person expressing as irrational. I’m a sane person experiencing insanity. I’m a god represented as a human. I’m a two-anus man limited to one. I should have been born with hands instead of feet, but I’m satisfied that I’m not a four-footed person.
I should have had 24 joints in each leg allowing me to take 36-foot steps and jump 96 feet into the air. I was supposed to develop telekinesis during puberty, but only strong enough to roll a pencil six inches across a flat surface—a more useful skill than you might imagine at first blush. I’m a colonial slaveowner who identifies as a slave trapped in the 21st century as a white middle-aged male U.S. citizen with no hope of being either a slave or a slaveowner.
I am Jeffrey Epstein grateful that I was born not being Jeffrey Epstein. I’m a Catholic Buddhist trapped in an atheist’s belief system. I’m a 21-year-old employed janitor trapped in middle-aged unemployment. I’m a slightly disabled person experiencing a more severely disabled mind. I’m a singularity thinking only in dualities. I have slightly above average intelligence possessing enough knowledge to be considered a genius in nearly any discipline at any time in any land prior to 1950.
I’m an organic rock perceived as a human being by other organic rocks who perceive themselves as human beings. I’m the fish I caught when I was a child. I have more than 100 different senses condensed into five. I would have the eyes of a fly if I lived to be 150 years old, but I’m scheduled to die at 80. I’m coherence eviscerated by contradiction.
…
Humanity in the 21st century is fragmented and confused. People have separated themselves from reality through entertainment, news, and technology. They are dulled yet mesmerized by flashing lights and loud noises while being isolated from one another. Online gossip has replaced the physicality of relationships. The passage of time is distorted by the speed of electronics; self is distorted by digital presentations of identity. Purposes and meanings have been lost in a sinkhole of empty promises and useless platitudes.
Many believe that anything is possible, but they’ve seen too many YouTube videos and read too many tweets to distinguish between hyperbole and truth. Conflict is constant. Down deep, there is a sense of foreboding, fear and loathing, insecurity and distrust. On the surface, though, yoga will save us all.
There’s a “fuck you” vibe emanating from everywhere and everyone, though it sometimes comes in the anonymous form of being ignored on Instagram. In the 21st century there is only NOW and “now” turns out to be a teen pop star. It would be fine if it was hedonism; at least there would be pleasure. Instead, people act more like they’re experiencing psychic root canals even when they get what they want. They nauseate themselves in the salacious as if they were rotted teeth soaking in sugar.
There are a few vagabonds and wanderers left, living the wild in the wilds of physical society. The rest have replaced persons with ideas of persons which is much easier to do with an iPhone than an abacus. There’s no use complaining about it, although complaining about it, as I am, is a form of participation in the horrifying emptiness of unnoticed monologues. It’s not as if there’s anything worthwhile to do and I can’t for the life of me get ahold of the resources that might transplant me into the few environments where the people have figured out ways to still be alive while living amongst the tweeting dead.
…
I was imagining myself as a being with different parameters of perception. I was aware that I was observing you while creating you and I was imagining you doing a thought exercise of being willing to trade your current life for a life in which you wake up early every morning and have a great day, an incredibly great day, every single day, but you always wind up, during the last five minutes of the day, shuddering and screaming in stark terror, fully aware that the most frightening possible experience that you had never previously imagined is suddenly occurring.
After five minutes of it, it doesn’t matter where you are, what you knew, what you think you knew, what you didn’t know, or why you couldn’t possibly understand what you couldn’t possibly understand. Beyond that, whenever, the next day, some things become so obvious about your predicament that you come up with a catch-phrase: It Is Exactly What … It Is.
That catchphrase may make you mildly famous as a C-level amateur meme generator on YouTube and, unfortunately for you, that might make it impossible for you to walk around in public without being harassed, usually by douchebags, the type of douchebags who hang out on message boards and Facebook and Twitter, and they’ll yammer and then they’ll stammer and they’ll tell you they’re pissed, not even at you, just some generic “you” who happens to have been born some time 25—no, 50—no, no, 25, no—
No, no, no, no, Dude: it’s 50 or greater—
Well, it can’t be less—
Do you even read what you type? How can you ask a question like that when the point that was being made was that anyone born into any societal or ethnic or economic or racial or any other category from somewhere like The Princeton School of Telling You Who You Are Identity Compendium of Subcategories Beyond Subcategories when you can’t even tell the difference between a generic “you” and the real you, the you that constantly invents itself and rocks out without any memory of what the fuck was just going on, oh my lord, sweet, sweet, Sweet Sweet!
But there’s no getting to those five minutes in memory every day and yet there’s no way for anyone who DOES know—friends or family—to change your last moments of consciousness each day, meaning you would be terrified nightly for five minutes which will be followed by a coma of sorts until you wake the next morning—who knows where or how you got there?
Do you want that life? Percentage wise, it’s a great deal. No matter what anyone knows about the last five minutes of your every-night, they will never be able to make you experience anything bad on any day, ever, because every one of your days begins wonderfully no matter what happened the night before and no matter what anyone believes they are going to do to create a bad situation for you, intentionally or not. The zen of the universe has said, “No, this one exists in this pattern for eternity.” No one else but you knows and, so, no one believes you; well, better said that they believe that you sincerely believe you’re forgetting, but that it must be pathological or, oh, some such psychological word that means you’re fucking cuckoo.
That could be you. Think about your life now. And now stop thinking about it in terms of the patterns you’ve identified that make up your day. That you is being replaced by THIS you I’m creating as I’m asking you to imagine that what I am writing is actually happening and you have awareness of my awareness of everything your imaginary you is experiencing at all times. I am, in some confused way, the god of your imaginary self. So, to best prepare myself for this task, I never thought about it until now and so it turns out to have been unimportant.
Telling you what didn’t happen is sometimes as important as telling you what did. It wasn’t long ago that you felt embarrassed at the thought that I knew it. And then you cried when you realized I not only knew but also experienced you, through my body, through my consciousness, and through whatever “else” that exists that has any possible use or meaning as possible or probable candidates for experience as an elongated French Pole. But … you also cried when you realized, “If he’s writing me this letter, this letter that … now that I think about it, is long overdue! Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
But of course, I’ll say, "This is your ‘imaginary you’ speaking. Who could have told you anything at all other than me? Seeing as how I’m imagining you imagining that you can live as I’m describing while being the object of my observance, I’d say it’s ‘me.’ I’m not judgmental, I’ll let you know that. I don’t interfere in any way. In no way, shape, or form has my imaginary experience of what ‘imaginary you’ experiences been a source of friction between us. I dig imaginary you; you’re cool. I hurt when you hurt and I hurt about exactly what you hurt about. This isn’t about empathy or sympathy or judgment or anything like such concepts as they can’t exist in this imaginary world where I imagine you most often live. No, instead—"
That was easily the best place to put to use my battery-activated mind. I call him Pudge Jocket Marl-Bone, the Fish Stealer. He goes by many other names, however, most of them you have never heard; in fact, if you heard some of those other names that you haven’t heard then all of your most cherished memories would be destroyed—
So, you think you got off lucky? I mean, I was imagining me imagining you imagine yourself as if you were following the instructions, both hidden and explicit. Remember, if you can, that your imaginary you always wakes in the morning completely unaware of the last five minutes of the night before. Imaginary you is able to recall all of your memories each day of your life except for those precious few minutes right before sleep. Excluding every terror experience which has been going on for years, every other minute except for those five minutes of panic attacks, catatonia, psychosis, The Jumping German of Georgia, and coprophagy (at least one feeding during every five minute terror), you are happy.
Neither must I say that things are far too sweet. Nothing told no one about the picture at the park of me eating in the dark while sitting on the bark of a log as it was dislodged from the shore and swept up in the fierce upper current of the Upper Maw Maw Bi-Hi-Tiki-Mai-Tai, the river known by locals for its mystical healing powers but also for the Bark-Backed Biddle Puss, easily the most famous for rigor in recent wild wet water rides; it’s the type of river sometimes thought about in a snidely fashion by people who constantly tell themselves, in not so many words, just how lightly and fairly they believe that their use of their subtle self-deceptive ethical mechanisms enabling them to love the thrill of white water “log-barging” makes them superior to anyone who hasn’t or won’t do it. They lie, they tell stories about their new-found powers, the powers they “discovered” they had after watching an investigative documentary about synesthesia or by seeing God in the form of a talking billygoat.
There’s no reason to go on with this. But then again, there was no reason to not go on with this. At that moment, I tasted what it meant to be free: the power to choose. Whatever I prefer. Whatever I reason. Whatever I feel. Whatever I want. Whatever you want. Whatever you need. Whatever I need. Whatever we need.
That wasn’t the only thing that happened, though. See, each of us exist on a multitude of levels layered over one another. The “me” you are interacting with now is equidistant from you in quasi-cosmological mechanics to the distance (time) between the earth and the sun. There’s a real roar into outer space in a splatter-shot spray. You did things to the social cosmos by denying a denial of doubt between skeptic and cynic, communicated most delicately as an equestrian performance. Did anyone else sense the irony? … Anyone?
Okay, so moving on to an alternate you. Notice I don’t say alternative. “Alternate you” is equal to all other alternate you’s. “Alternative you” implies a being being more than another being is being. That don’t fly here. Everyone is a being so everyone belongs here until you leave or cease to be. Whichever. One of those two things will happen. That’s today’s lesson for kindergarten: Beings either leave or die. Eventually. You get used to it. Or, rather, you get used to no one acknowledging it in a serious, contemplative, deliberate, or useful way. So it doesn’t come up. When I bring it up it’s a sort of a conversation killer … unless I will it forward purposefully, making all of the best and worst statements in such a perfectly even tête-à-tête that neither side succeeds in making any progress with the other about the subject that was being argued about. Strange way to describe something. Better stop.
Choo Choo MaGoo, old friend of Alley Cretinton’s, first brother of Earl on the Davis side of the family, though there’s supposedly some Afghani in there somewhere, said, “No, shit, that’s my stash.”
Okay, we’ll have to quit that game. Too many distractions, too many poets, too many women playing harps. It’s one lady playing a harp. One is too many, that’s what I’m getting at, see? Is it not obvious from where you stand?
I saw a donkey making its way to Turky Town, being led by Francis Duffleready, third godson of Luke Wagner of the Thurgood Wagners from Port Chestershire. This happened yesterday at 3:00 pm. What are we going to do now? Anyone have a suggestion? Anyone?
—Well, we could make the woman stop by asking her to stop.
—Or we could break her hard with baseball bats.
—And maybe throw her from the rooftop into the middle of the street!
All excellent ideas, fellas. I think we can do all that and more if we sacrifice a virgin as she’s losing her virginity in a matter of weeks. We can sell tickets to the affair, the public making of a whore and then the public making of a whore into a headless cadaver thanks to a machete. Sell trinkets, make the headless whore cadaver into a martyr who tried to bring greater liberties for the citizens.
It was then that I gave them the right to vote, shocking all who had come to me by my true identity as your “imaginary you” when you’re dreaming. I’m the one doing the stuff you “observe” from a sort of 3rd-person-sometimes-1st-person dream where you can feel that there is “something” else there, a presence of being stronger than your own presence, but only truly stronger in the minuscule context of buzzing at a higher vibration. Still, for your sake, I try to alter and slow down into a more jazzy flow, with little hip hops, be bops, Jeremiah saw bullfrog, where have all the flowers gone, I’m the Rocket Man, Once In a Lifetime, Same As It Ever Was, Same As It Ever Was, Same As It Ever Was, Same As It Ever Was …
