The flaming wreck of what was once part of a car provides the only light on this strip of melted, twisted asphalt. The fire shines defiantly, as if daring the darkness to object, and in this post-apocalyptic Earth, it is the most beautiful Rico, Dirk’s boy, has ever seen in his eighteen years of life.
That’s approximately how I feel right now. Like I am the lone survivor of a horrible plane crash sitting there in shock, watching the flames consuming a random piece of the fuselage, too dazed to even be happy that I am alive.
So, something something staring at fire.
This is where I talk about envying visual artists. I have these powerful images in my head that I would love to share with the world but I have none of the necessary skills.
Then again, I can share those images with you, my patient reader, via a few minutes of typing, and I am sure there are visual artists who would envy the fuck out of that.
That’s another reason I could never be a visual artist. It’s so much work!
So right now, I feel sort of dazed and I am looking around at the wreckage of my life and wondering how the hell I got here, what the hell happened, and what the hell am I supposed to do now?
Part of me wants to wander off into the desert and lose myself in the shifting sands. This would be stupid as hell, of course, and I would probably die.
Still, it has its allure. It would be nice to finally escape myself somewhere where I am not merely unknown but unknowable because there is nobody there to know me.
Coyotes and bunnies don’t count.
And it would be nice to, as Douglas Coupland put it, “lose all unwanted momentums” and find out what life is like when the voices in my head run out of things to talk about.
I think the real allure, though, is that it would be a time where I could finish all my thoughts. Without my computer, the Internet, books, TV, or any other source of distraction and stimulation, my brain could finally catch up with the backlog and finish all the incomplete thoughts echoing around in my mind and maybe I would finally know an inner quiet that would let me, at long last, be truly calm.
Plus, I’d probably masturbate a lot. Those desert prophets never mention THAT.
The idea of inner silence both pleases and frightens me. It would be great to finally get some real rest instead of sleeping in a madhouse all the time. ECT science proves that a lot of what compromises depression is just the lingering effects of long term exposure to too much mental noise and a clean reboot of your brain works wonders.
Don’t call it electroshock, though. All it does is reboot the brain and that can be done with an extremely small shock if you know where to apply it.
A brain reboot sounds wonderful to me. My mind has a very advanced CPU and yet there is so much lag in the system because of all these programs running at the same time hogging all the available memory with their resource heavy OS operations.
Might be nice to get rid of all that clutter.
On the other hand, I feel the same kind of nameless dread when I imagine what having a clear mind that I have when I imagine that this room of mine as spotlessly clean.
The sane side of me thinks that sounds wonderful. At long last, tidiness, organization, and structure in my environment. Neato.
But the deep down dark crazy side of me is freaking out because then all my bad stuff would come out. And that would be the worst thing ever. That must never, ever be allowed to happen. If that happened, people would see what a gross, disgusting. multi-toxic thing I am and that would annihilate me.
At least, that’s how it feels.
It’s a lot like nausea. It’s the feeling that there is something in you that is trying to come out and your body is trying to make that happen but your mind is fighting it, tooth and nail, and winning.
Now would be a good time to remind my patient readers that my mother and I, who arfe a lot alike, both have bizarrely high nausea tolerance.
This metaphor works on so many levels.
But seriously…. what is the worst that could happen if all my bad stuff “came out”. Sure, it would, no doubt, be a horrifying and disgusting experience and I might have to go through a period of feeling profound shame and humiliation and the desire to go hide away from everything forever.
But I would still be there afterwards. So would the world. No annihilation would have occurred. In fact, based on my experience in these things, I’d expect that :
- It would not be nearly as bad as I thought
- People would understand and forgive
- I would feel a whole lot better afterward, and
- I would wonder why I hadn’t done it ages ago.
The answer to that last question is far too complicated to get into right now,. but the short answer is. it ain’t that simple.
A runner doesn’t cross the finish line and say “D’uh! That whole thing was about crossing the finish line! Why didn’t I do that at the start?”.
So letting it all come up and get out is definitely the sound, wise,. practical, sensible thing to do. Cost benefit analysis clearly shows that the long term benefits more than justify the short term unpleasantness.
And yet… and yet… here comes that same old fear.
Because if I rid myself of my toxins…. what then? What does that brave new world look like? And who would I be? Someone I wouldn’t even recognize?
And would that be such a bad thing? Being who I am right now sure as fuck isn’t working out too well for me.
Maybe I need to discard who I am right now in order to become what I am meant to be.
Time to spin the coccoon and go to sleep a caterpillar so I can wake up a butterfly.
Time to be…. reborn.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.