Things ain’t so good in the neighborhood today.

It started yesterday, actually. I ended up not going out to Felicity’s place last night, like Joe and I usually do on Tuesdays, because I had gotten some pretty strong warning signs from deep within the bowels of….. my bowels, and those told me I should stay home and near the bathroom and try to relax.

And things have only gotten worse from there. By the evening I felt cold, and scared, and fragile, and small, and it hasn’t let up since.

Someone pulled the plug and I have been draining away ever since.

Physically, I feel an all too familiar combination of sinus pressure, headaches, nausea, and testicular pain.

One of these things is not like the other.

These factors combine to make one potentially extremely hellish condition, and I have been very carefully managing my condition to make sure I don’t end up that way.

Sooner or later, it’s going to happen, though. It usually does. I will have to spend my twenty minutes in hell eventually. Head throbbing with pain. Skin twitching subtly, sweat pouring out of me so fast it looks like I am under a waterfall, guts twisting like the tear soaked handkerchief of a desperate widow, mind screaming in that special way reserved for those moments when my clarity of mind is so compromised that it’s like suddenly being thrust into total darkness and silence.

Only far, far worse.

Because even sensory deprivation leaves me my faculties to try to cope with the situation and figure out WTF is going on.

But when my mind is compromised. I freak out as hard as it is possible to freak out because now I am in total chaos and nothing makes sense.

It’s bad, is what I am saying.

Luskily, like I said, it usually doesn’t last more than 20 minutes or so – 20 LONG minutes, subjectively speaking, but still a relatively short time.

And it usuallty ends all at once, like a cork was stuck inside me somewhere and the pain gets worse and worse until the cork pops, and then, blessed relief.

In fact, it often leaves me quite giddy for a while. That’s what happens when the pain suddenly vanishes but the endorphins are still there, ready to party.

It’s quite lovely.

But I am also usually glad when it cools down to something a wee bit less psychologically white hot.

I am not built for long trips into transcendental consciousness and the hyper activated mental state that results from it.

I am built for the much more controlled and harnessable version, the creative consciousness. It’s a lot like transcendental consciousness in that it has the same free flowing nature, rich bed of connections, and thoughts springing whole seemingly out of nowhere, but it’s within the safe confines of creative thought.

I feel like kind of a pussy saying that. But there are limits to even my mental explorations, and for reasons I just made clear a few paragraphs ago, anything that goes beyond conscious control is asking far too much of my mistrustful, paranoid, control crazy soul.

I can go damned near anywhere, but only if my conscious mind comes with me.

The idea of being able to go beyond that intrigues me though. I am far from claiming my rational restraints as a sign of superiority or even an undiluted boon. It amazes me to think there are people who can exceed those limits and leave their conscious mind behind and have experiences that are entirely “of the soul”, so to speak, and think nothing of it.

From here within my cage of reason, that seems like pure magic.

And I suppose it is, in a way.

And it’s nice to know that there are places I fear to tread and powers greater than my own, even if only on this extremely abstract level.

It’s a uniquely trying thing to be able to defy the adults in your world at will from an early age. Authority just didn’t take with me. To me, it was hilariously obvious how voluntary authority was, and how easy it was to crush it utterly by simply refusing to cooperate with it.

No wonder I could be such a smartass. I am just glad that it was an occasional thing with me, when I felt rankled or upset by something, and the rest of the time I was a well behaved student who just wanted to do what he was supposed to do.

Otherwise, someone would have throttled me before I left elementary school.

I have been thinking a lot about what I have been thinking of as “the Cheshire Mask” lately. By that, I mean the grinning mocking challenging face of the trickster, the one that has no agenda except stirring the pot for his own amusement and who stings and vanishes, distrupts and disappears, flicks and fades, always just ahead of those who want to kill him by locking him in chains

The asshole, in other words. Not exactly evil because he’s not exactly malicious nor is he seeking to hurt anybody or force anyone to do his bidding.

Instead, he is the purification of the trickster’s role, which is to challenge, disrupt, disturb, and annoy people in order to get them to wake up and think.

Whether or not this is a good or bad thing depends on how you feel about what is being disrupted and who is being irritated.

Robin Hood, after all, is exactly that kind of trickster. He uses cleverness, wit, skill, and sheer audacity to not merely defeat the forces of evil but mock and enrage them, and then he goes off with his merry men.

But so is the Joker. There is far more malice, sadism, and outright cruelty to his “merry japes”, but the role is more ot less the same.

I suppose it all circles back to the one thing I can’t accept about the trickster in any form, including the one in me, and that’s its amorality.

I can’t be the Cheshire Mask, mocking and disrupting without a care for the consequences of his actions as long as he gets to amuse himself at the expense of the serious and the austere.

But he calls to me sometimes. And part of me responds. That part of me wants nothing more than to leave all seriousness behind and turn the world into one big joke.

And so, from time to time, I invite him over for tea.

And oh, what tales he tells!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.