Category: Philosophical woo

A wink at the intersection

by Connor M, posted in City, People, Philosophical woo

Bringgg, bringgg, on the cot beside me. Like a little bird trapped in the sheets. A banner across the top of my phone “Malaria Meds”.

She looked up briefly, disinterested, professional, and carried on.

I giggled, only I knew the absurdity.

A little intersection of two parts of my brain, high-fiving in the red-light district alley. The horny, fresh haircut traveler finally giving in and the recreational germaphobe fresh from exploring un-sanitized regions of the world.

I’d gotten all my shots before Africa. Typhoid, Diphtheria-Tetanus, give me a lollipop. Careful with malaria, take Malarone daily, and seven days after you leave. I was by then several days past that window.

She keeps going, I look around the room at the low lights, feel the heavily scented air. Fiddle with the phone volume briefly.

Health abroad is one of my forever vigilances. The first mis-timed sneeze and I’m at the corner pharmacy. Paying a grinning doctor way too much to give me a Z-pac and send me back to the dusty streets.

Bringg, Bringgg. I grab the phone, finally silence it. Exhale.

She looks up at me, “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you finish.” Maybe she thought it was my wife? Or the cosmos was randomly chiming in to wrap up this unsavory encounter?

I had strolled the Red-Light district a few times, a couple 50 euro notes burning holes in my pocket. Got back to the train car hostel, pop my pill, wondering when I was going to slip behind a curtain.

The two currents weaving through each other, health freak, horny guy, shadow selves in the forest. Never noticing each other until they were face to face.

Oh hey. They shake hands. My Id family reunion at the brothel.

We’re always at the intersection of some neuroses, fantasies, laundry.

Adrift in a Pacific garbage patch of junk food and overstimulation, or riding a swift current trying to keep a newborn alive, ignoring every other force for the moment.

The more you push one down the weirder places they pop up.

I’d googled all the rigorous health protocols that prostitutes undergo there, felt reassured. I made some loops, found different alleys.

The red glints on the cobblestones, foggy air, laughs of the high British tourists stumbling around with Heinekens. Churches from 1640, austere, having to look down at the oldest human desires they couldn’t wash away.

Eventually, I caught the eye of the most animated lady: big fake tits, easy smile and laugh, warm eyes. I felt like she cared. Rapport matters, in any business.

I walked in and she closed the curtain, triaged me like a field medic. Faint conversations of passersby in the alley.

“It’s more to touch,” she said, watching my eyes drift.

Now the phone reminder’s off, but the alarm echoed in my head.

I didn’t have a reminder that told me to go to a bar and try to chat up a cute traveler, or one in the busy hostel.

No alarm that said chill the fuck out you’re not going to get malaria 2 weeks after from a mosquito that got stuck in your carry-on.

Just these stale pathways rooted in me, twisted by loneliness, travel fatigue, adrift with my own paranoias, crossing paths.

What current pulls you? How many secrets up your sleeve don’t make it past the grocery line conversation.

Get a note that grandma is in the hospital while you’re chuffing up a mountain feeling alive.

Think you’re writing a novel in a coffee shop but you’re really just aura flirting with the girl in yoga pants. Wallowing in self-pity at a drive thru when the cashier with the Chia Pet hairline asks how your day is, and you stop to actually take a look.

Riding one wave until another knocks you back to center.

Horny/hypochondria. Odd bedfellows. They briefly winked at each other as I sat in that brothel. You realize how absurd you are right, Guy? See you soon.

Choose your American Dream

by Connor M, posted in People, Philosophical woo

It’s 9:58 pm Saturday night at a restaurant in downtown Nashville. The restaurant closes at 10:00 pm. A couple walks in wearing Savannah Bananas gear (the comedy baseball team). The lady is a tiny pixie haired shrew, and the man looks somewhere in the middle of Jabba the Hut and the Mucinex man. His poor knees buckle as he shuffles his belly to sit like a pregnant mother. I, the waiter, run over and tell them the kitchen closes in 2 minutes, so we’ll need to get their order as soon as possible.

This brings the dirtiest look I’ve ever seen from the man who complains to my manager he’s being rushed. She offers a free dessert and an eye roll when she walks away.

Instead of getting ready to close, the servers groan as the man settles in, drinking his sprite with diabetic fingers and a knowing grin.

Meanwhile, in the open-air kitchen 30 feet away from sloth and gluttony another drama is unfolding. There have been recent Immigration raids in the area, ICE is stopping foreign looking people at random and asking for papers. There had been 100 arrests, many already on the road to deportation. Panic is setting in amongst the undocumented kitchen staff.

This had been escalating for a few days. They’d been carpooling with white people, sneaking in through back doors. South Nashville (majority Latino) was a ghost town. All the recreational spaces were shut down, no more football, dance clubs, pop up celebrations. Just eerie silence and waiting. Word reached us that ICE was two streets away doing stops.

In the back of the kitchen was a mother and her son, a middle-aged woman from Guatemala, and 3 cooks in their 20’s, all with families. The sous chef paces back and forth to the front window looking out at any passing police cars. His eyes are welling with tears but he’s holding them back. A stoic leader is vital right now.

You can feel the silent terror just sitting on them like a blanket. They’ll be ready to run out the back door any minute. These people are working 14-hour days, living with 6 others in a house. The chef hasn’t seen his family from home in ten years. They risked their lives to get here to just scrape by and sacrifice so their kids might have a chance.

Out front, Jabba is eating his pizza thoughtfully. He considers the crust, shuffles his gut forward, asks for more ice and another sprite please. His casual tone broadcasting his inalienable right to comfort and relaxation. He side-eyes the chef when he comes up to look out the window. They’re the last table in an empty restaurant, still ordering food.

The front of house is standing there with eye daggers pointed at him.

The man had come from a comedy baseball game, the purest American form of leisure and absurdity. He came in entitled and ready to sit for as long as his bloated legs would hold him, savoring the opportunity to punish us for rushing him.

The 14-year-old dishwasher in the back, weighing all of 90 pounds is eating scraps, checking his mom’s phone. It took weeks for him to make eye contact, just the occasional wry smile. His worst fears were confirmed when his cousin was arrested last week. He and his mom took a few days to hide in their house. Now they can’t leave with customers here, can’t go outside while police lights blaze across the windows.

The Irony of the American dream playing out with vivid contrast. An entitled beast coming from a baseball game, not a care in the world. Eating himself to death because he’s allowed. A kitchen full of people working 60-hour weeks for minimum wage, clinging to each other in fear they’ll have their life swept away any moment.

Labored breath from both parties, 30 feet away from each other. Ask them what they think they deserve?

Truth in Dark Places (nsfw, safe for thought)

by Connor M, posted in Philosophical woo, Uncategorized

I had a comedy bit but I don’t have the stage presence to deliver it, so I’ll write it instead.

I noticed that when I used to watch porn, I wasn’t consuming it in the way they warn you about. I wasn’t watching increasingly sadistic, unrealistic fantasy stuff. There were no tentacles, orgies, no buffering anime tits. The reports of men going soft with their Wendy’s cook girlfriend because they’re using VR porn to bang 3 hookers in a hot tub in Cancun. That’s not me.

I found myself deep in the libraries of Pornhub scraping for scenarios that had just enough credibility to be real in my life. In some horrible alternate timeline, I could find myself in this exact POV (point-of-view) situation, living out this depravity for an inkling of sexual gratification.

I wanted post nut clarity like Joseph Smith discovering a shameful new religion. I wanted a life reckoning, the smells and sights and regret boners truly felt and earned.

One video stands out as a lighthouse in the dark. I found it some pages along the Pornhub shuffle. It’s grainy from the start. It opens with a neon PowerPoint message scrolling down the page, like Star Wars for the less fortunate.

“I went to help my mom’s friend …

wearing grey sweat pants…

she couldn’t resist”

Cut to:

Someone holding a phone aimed at a pale skinny stomach, recording down towards a tumbleweed. Looking up at the viewer is a woman of some 60 years.

You can see Fox News in the back, a dog wandering around. The cigarette smell has surely settled onto the clothes haphazardly falling out of the numerous dressers. Her papyrus skin glints in the camera light.

I watch this ready for my form of escapism, I want it to feel so grossly real that my body reacts.

————-

So, I create a scene in my head: I was working at a restaurant late with my older coworker. She has a fun personality and we flirt casually.

Her Corolla has been acting up recently, could I give her a ride home?

I hesitate but say sure why not. We make awkward talk on the way, when we arrive at her house she asks, “Want to stop in for a beer? I owe you one.”

And we have the set up my friends.

————-

We have the front lobe calculations that put me in sweatpants on that poorly fitted bed sheet.

I have to be able to see myself in the scenario, but more importantly, I have to be able to see the part of myself that is dark enough to go there. Porn as escapism must acknowledge our humanity, not rise above it into an unrecognizable fantasy realm. It’s the dirty “what-ifs” that simmer underneath and ache to be tapped.

In the near future, when nobody can get it up, there will still be those in the trenches seeking gritty realism.  

There will always be the frontiersmen finding sideways videos from hotel rooms, backs of cars, or rent controlled houses. The sex was so real and urgent and kinda gross that it had to happen. People living on the precipice of demise, rushing to act before their brain catches up with them. That’s how we got here.

Maybe we’ll pay more for that in the future, to get back to reality. AI is conditioning us to live in this false reality and seek things that we’ll never actually see; create images of ourselves and storylines that barely scratch the real. Are you really a sex god satisfying these single women in your area, or are you a pirate radio freak fucking before your body falls apart and your judgment kicks in? The ugliness, the futility, and living on the edge of ruin that’s required to feel fully alive sometimes. Slugging down the Oregon trail, haunting scratched home VHS that have gathered dust; masturbating regally, while the violinist plays and the ship sinks.

Did Cavemen write “You are enough” on the wall?

by Connor M, posted in Philosophical woo, Uncategorized

Did cavemen kill themselves or did writing really set that off? Being useful for a brief time was much more important than being meh for a long time.

Once vocabulary and writing and pictures from across the seas showed beautiful women and paradises you could never acquire, existential pangs had more bite.

Envy was only supposed to exist within arm’s reach, so you could aspire to it in the immediate. Now it’s largely on a screen.

Did cavemen have to write on the wall “You are enough”? or did they just get killed if they weren’t? Survival of the fittest is now survival of the fantasist, able to imagine you matter in the vast realm of modern society. Able to either tune out or create a reality that is sufficiently barricaded against your own inadequacies.

Nature does help. A long hike makes thoughts hit more like a breeze than a truck thudding into a wall. Getting out of the country, or into smaller places helps. In the city seeing a beautiful happy couple makes you want to kill yourself, bing boom, action reaction. But in nature the tranquility slows the instant gratification mind that craves answers. In nature, internal inadequacy and failure grows like moss so it can be observed, a natural arc of life and death.

I’ve had chances to let my thoughts mature in quiet places, both beautiful idea trees and dogshit saplings.  I sat in the jungle in Peru with no cell service for a few weeks. The heat seared my brain. My envy/inadequacy meter reset to my group of fellow travelers and the indigenous Machiguenga living off the grid supporting us.

Do they think about killing themselves? Does their envy get bottled into small village status wars- biggest fish, fastest boat, same race different track?

They see these travelers come in with loads of money and a lifetime of experiences, but those little seeds of despair aren’t planted. They watch us struggle with the heat and mosquitos and insects the size of our feet and just giggle. The immediacy outweighs the wide world they can’t really know. Our Instagram feeds don’t mean anything when you’re shitting in an outhouse and a moth lands on your face.

But even with their minimalist life, they still huddle into the one cell service spot to watch Tiktok as their eyes glaze over. I hope they can keep the envy within arm’s reach, like our ancestors did, tied to things they can touch, smell and fight for. Work out to look like your older uncle. Have the balls to ask out your neighbor, build her a house. Don’t check your feed.

Gravity Shifts and Grocery Stores

by Connor M, posted in People, Philosophical woo, Uncategorized

Kroger grocery store midday on a Tuesday. Winter still around in Nashville, you feel it most in the parking lot. The people who normally stroll through the parking lot like kings on parade are actually putting up a brisk pace. Trash tumbleweed and cold cigarette smoke hit you right before the sliding doors open. I started hearing a child shrieking behind me.

It’s the nervous high-pitched yelps a child might make on Christmas, mixed with some anxiety. It immediately sours my mood as I walk in the warm lobby. Why didn’t I hear a soothing mother’s voice hushing him? I head to the carrots, perturbed.

“Ah… Ahh Ah!” Little rapid fire blurts, then silence. They follow in behind me. Now it can be heard in the whole store. I turn around to see a little kid sitting in a cart. He can’t be more than 3 or 4, swinging legs dangling through the holes. His mother is overweight, looks like they’re struggling a bit, but she has a huge smile on her face. You can tell undefeatable energy when you see it. “AH, ahh”.. he bleats on.

She stands next to a man near the entrance. They’re beaming at each other for a moment, and she rapidly moves her hands to start talking in sign language. He nods and signs back.

They carry on, with the little child smoke alarm still going off. People skirt around them, confused. The two are locked in, their faces and hands show two friends catching up at a coffee shop. The child continues. I stood by the produce and watched for a beat too long.

 I’m a sensitive person, I will fully admit I suffer more from sounds, textures, and spatially and spiritually unaware people than others do. This odd little family juxtaposition entertained and annoyed me. I wonder what everyone else briskly moving by thought.

Does the mother know or simply not care? Is this child responding to never speaking out loud with anyone by just yelling out? Is this the rhino and the little bird on the savanna living in symbiosis to help each other? God smiled on this Deaf mother and her Siren son pairing.

Her warm, unconcerned smile could be a rare time he sees that reaction, this pairing couldn’t be out of randomness. The cosmic balance walking around Kroger looking at bananas.

We all go about our lives tumbling and yelling and butting heads or melding in with others, circling in orbit hoping to find our gravitation counterpoint. The romantic in me hopes I can find this partner by luck or action, the calm deaf person to my wailing boy. The antidote to occasional genius or madness with a warm, calm demeanor.

Meanwhile I’m strolling through Kroger head down, working, going to the gym. No drastic bends to the fabric of normality, trying to present as cool and collected.

Maybe I have to get so hot and uncomfortable that I let the steam out at the grocery store, or Twitter? I plow forward with everything on my sleeve. Everybody is broadcasting something; has some frequency that can complement and balance another. The mother and son some odd reminder that maybe there is a point to it. I try to pick up alterations in the daily life, later that day on the same busy road I saw another kind of shift.

Coffee Shop

That afternoon at the coffee shop. Homeless and drunks and hipsters all working away at something. It’s a place of quiet conversations and politeness, political correctness and funky couches that have their own Instagram account. I saw another glitch. A homeless lady walked into shop slamming the door behind her. She ignored every hello; how can I help you?

I looked up to see her, huge backpack slouching off the shoulder, burnt from head to toe and layered in heavy coats. She went to the counter, grabbed the bathroom key and strolled to the back to lock herself in. Some murmurs from the workers, a subtle smile to each other.

After a couple minutes, as simply as she came in, she walked out of the bathroom with the key, again ignoring the barista calling after her. This time all eyes left their bible studies group and almond lattes to follow her on her march. Like the aforementioned kings of the parking lot, she strolled right past everyone. “Ma’am!” She swung open the front door, stepped off the curb and onto the busy street. The barista charged after. He intercepted her as she was about to Frogger her way through traffic.

She was unaware of every person, custom, traffic law. She said nothing but had everyone’s attention for that brief period. We all sat in brief discomfort of her signal, slapped physically and olfactorily.

There was nobody there to offset her heavy presence, but she could have been on her way to meet her counterpoint on the other side of the road. She could be bulldozing normality and serving looks to wake us up from our mundane discomforts. Eventually she’ll run into traffic or a life changing opportunity.

Or do you just go down the middle and not need the balance? Be palatable. Work, drink, weather, football, complaints and aspirations that won’t turn any heads in the grocery store.

There’s people at grocery stores and coffee shops and street corners who are heavy walking billboards of harsh truths. Autistic infants, patient mothers, homeless women plowing into traffic. We’ll scramble to avoid looking at ugly realities.

The more fortunate polish their billboard every day, online and in real life. Annoyed by the yelling infant, buying craft beer, curating the same sheen in mind, body, and status.

The harsher your truth the more drastic the balance.

I have to figure out where my weight goes. All the dogshit humanity beneath my Republican haircut wants to breathe. It’ll pull and repel rather than just cling to a false self-image. I’m not an algorithm, despite how much optimization seems to build your prestige.

My ideas or sadness or joy will only matter if seen unfiltered.  When I walk into a room with only the weight of my presence and not my baggage, I’ll find a genuine conversation. Be the squealing infant when you need to say it, rather than burying it with dopamine hits. Grab the key and walk into traffic instead of pruning your eyebrows. No more diet coke friendships that feel good on the surface and make you sick. No more hiding the dark, let the light find it.

Seesaw

by Connor M, posted in Philosophical woo

Pain and pleasure on a spectrum, they can come in an IV drip or in a crashing flood. Both swing the pendulum back and forth in a predictable manner.

Sleep gets mildly disrupted, wake up to a somewhat humid room your eyes are crusty, back feels a bit sore.

Grateful to be here, grateful to be alive.

The mood wall. It plays news, music, uses a slight filter for the mirror (depending on where your trajectory will go for the day). It makes you look more gaunt and baggy, or maybe it tightens your skin to uplift your spirits before you walk out.

The shower water temp is a bit hot; the eggs are a bit overcooked.

You go through the same motions; these are pre-programmed as they have created a predictable dopamine ride to prepare you for the day and harness your cortisol awakening response. You dry your hair this way, put on your socks just so. You meditate. Since your minute motions are predictable, the smart environment knows how to tweak these to change your internal feed.

Traffic patterns show a delay you weren’t notified about, at work there was a last-minute meeting scheduled that you didn’t receive notice of a system update.

Maybe the barista doesn’t remember your name, though you’ve been there several times over the past few months. Maybe the pretty girl’s eye you’ve caught doesn’t happen to look up today, your chance to meet fades away again.

But what if you locked eyes and smiled? Fleeting moments of beauty- that’s what gets sealed in. “Core memories” If you use Instagram and adopt that vernacular. Smells, noises, swish of hair and a side look. That feeling hits you unexpectedly, whether scrolling aimlessly on the toilet or stuck in traffic. Hopefully not at the same time.

Those are what the hippocampus imprints, replays, and yearns for forever more. The forgettable laundry moments require discipline though, they are what are championed. You have to put in that dopamine groundwork to prepare you to appreciate the perfect gaze, that song that sends shivers, that sexual moment where you feel like a fucking animal and forget about the world.

You need the predictable to appreciate the moments of unexpected beauty. But what if predictable is pain skewed, and you are constantly fighting for the baseline? Using that IV drip from your phone to fart you along from 10-1, then to 1. Caffeine, Adderall, anti-depressants, Instagram, Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs leading you through the day. But the ups and downs turn into a seesaw attached to a jet engine. Up and down until your brain is whiplashed. No wonder It’s hard to fucking feel ok.

It’s all relative, all based on your programming. That day is set by the day before. The synapses clock in and clock out. They’ll eat what you feed you them. They grow diabetic from TikTok, or turn into David Goggins if you live off grid and make straw dolls for fun.

I’ve smashed the seesaw before. My ass got sore, my eyes were baggy, and I was having self-righteous arguments with imagined foes in the shower.

So I sat in a jungle staring at the wall listening to the rain. I stroked a female’s hair and held in a delicate fart to not break the silence. Sweat dripped off my face into rocks as I labored up a mountain at dawn. I congratulated myself for doing insanely normal human shit because I had forgotten what it was. Unplug the seesaw, instead, make it a bike ride over hills. Never easy, but not so abrupt.

Your God(s)

by Connor M, posted in Mountain, Philosophical woo

We all have our gods, perhaps less ethereal and enlightening than the days of old, gods waging war in the sky, ritual sacrifices for the rain to come. Steve Caporizzo, news channel 6 weather man doesn’t have to kill a goat on air to solidify this weekend’s sunny holiday commute.

Our gods still exist, we pray to them, make sacrifices whether we know it or not. They set us straight with a tender hand or a stinging wrath. We question our faith, or whether it ever existed when the rules don’t seem to add up.

Diarrhea is a god of traveling. He pokes his head up at the fruit stand as you examine the coloration on a mango. He giggles, a small child hiding behind his mother’s skirt as she pulls chicken out of a bucket sitting in the sun onto a flat top grill. He swoops in after you’ve had a majestic day hiking to a remote Incan gate that overlooks the valley and towering Andes mountains. Whether you know it or not, he will have to humble you eventually.

That day in particular had such a drastic swing in fortune I had to wonder If I had angered some spiritual force. My birthday, waking up before sunrise to hike several hours up a grueling path to the most beautiful outlook I’ve ever seen. Only on the return did I feel the gurgle, as I began to see the town reappear. It grew as I hit the cobblestone streets. It started screaming as I rushed through the alleys past merchants and loitering tourists, praying for the merciful toilet. I made it barely, only to start my gastrointestinal rebirthing.

I went through this process many a times. Starting to eventually see some karma in my matrix of decisions, bigger than simply eating spoiled food that handed me this unfortunate but temporary fate. Finding yourself in a new location, tied to the toilet, you slow down and reassess.

Watching the enormous moths dance around the candlelight in a porta potty deep in the rainforest. Listening to cars zoom below as you shiver in a tiny apartment in an Andean town, sitting at an angle because your knees don’t fit in the space between the wall and toilet. Dripping sweat in a beach bungalow as you swat away mosquitoes.

No Amazon prime, or CVS, or calling into your primary care. You are in the elements paying the natural price. Momentum swings to a halt to force reflection. We’re reminded how little control we really have despite our western conditioning to the contrary. Fate changes much faster than your conscious awareness. Accept your gastric meditation. Thank the gods for allowing you safe passage to your rebirth, and not greeting you on cobblestones in front of cute families walking their kids to Sunday mass.

You believe in higher powers when life is this abrupt, comforts are gone, and beauty and destitution sit hand and hand smiling at you every day. The intersection of fate and control is in much sharper contrast. Coming down to the Sacred Valley on a steep treacherous road, one very tight curve was strewn with flowers and placards. I could only imagine the awful fates at this very spot.

I watched a woman say a prayer as we decelerated slightly towards it. I could have stared up at the looming peaks or the lush river valley and never noticed. I could have felt the thrill without any grounding, chatted with the soccer team heading to a game, listened to the loud reggaeton coming from the front. But this tia, she has done this every time she takes the bus from Cusco for work. It wheezed up and down these mountains, breaks faltering, frame rusted to the core, and necessity and collective good faith allowed it safe passage. Some buffer against a huge indifferent universe.

 So, with lack of empirical evidence and beast gurgling within, you turn towards the heavens and wait. You buy some pepto and beg a tia to make you rice, wondering how you angered the God, but grateful for this opportunity for reflection.   

Ayahuasca

by Connor M, posted in Jungle, Philosophical woo

The first inklings of change are the heat and discomfort emanating from your stomach. The gurgle is more primordial, it feels like the gaseous swamps of creation where meteors slammed into a churning earth and microorganisms split and swam in their perilous and short lifetimes. You can tell an entity is awakening inside you. The dimensions of the room start to change, and the darkness becomes heavier. Each light and figure are like a Plato’s cave, huge and distorted shadows build into castles and vast cities that morph away just as quickly.

You start rolling, heaving with the surf inside your stomach. The Frenchman is the first to go.

I was asleep in a treehouse one night several hundred yards away, and I couldn’t mistake his ceremony commencing hurl. It echoed throughout the jungle with resentment and relief, a bitter purge that only a French could muster.

            He goes first next to me and shatters the relative calm, almost to signal to everybody else that it was time. More faint cries, mutters, or stomachs so loud that they can be heard in full volume. Another person heaves, this time a British girl, so well-spoken and mild mannered, now bent over with a high-pitched wail and spewing into her container. Those shitty little plastic buckets were a stark contrast to the mountains of incense, perfumes, crystals, various feathers and excrements and other high holy insignia of the ceremony that serve less of a purpose than our Fischer Price puke buckets.

            I start to feel the wood floor, in a way that I’ve never felt anything. Like when in the movies an ancient hand graces the bark of a tree at sunset, I’m sure if observed someone would have found it oddly erotic. On the way up you become overwhelmed with beauty, with how its embedded in everything around us. I began to think about women I know, women in the room. How they seemed like a python ready to strike, or a soft and inquisitive bird of paradise. How they moved and held themselves and had an impossible Schrodinger’s box attractiveness that had to be observed to be real. How every ounce of health and beauty and vitality was borrowed, and what we lack or can’t create in ourselves we find balance and potential in others. I understood why beauty exists; it pulls, it compels, I will do anything to get a taste of that which I don’t have but see in you, to bring that light into my own existence even just for a minute.

            I saw vast timelines of life and aging, and how we get this torch to burn and share and show the way, and it fades as you get older and some people hopelessly cling to it.  People get resentful of those more attractive, younger, fitter, wiser, things they can’t touch. Suffering gets bottled up neatly in their organs, and sealed in with alcohol, denial, workaholism. Eventually they become a rusty shell of a human that limps through the day without noticing anything.

Flashing images of traumas, maybe imagined, suffering of people in the room. Thinking about how a guy in the group was named after a prize fish; like his namesake boiled down to being held on a line by a smiling fisherman admiring his physique and power. I was fucked.

            How all my aunts and grandma faked every interaction because a glimpse of sincerity would ruin the whole façade. How unresolved generational traumas slink down through families because nobody can face them in their lifetime, only to hand that baggage off to the next of kin. And those kids develop their own issues that stunt their growth, so they can’t broadcast their beauty or see it in others. Their energy becomes like a blocked stagnant river that starts to smell like shit. People turn away. There is no exchange, no flow, no movement of pain that wants to be let go of.

 Out of all of this, when approached by our facilitator and asked if I was okay, all I could muster was “it’s all borrowed”, as I stroked the wooden floor and rolled around moaning in pleasure. Having sex in this state would have been impossible to conceive, I began to understand why it’s off the menu when doing this. Though curiously it seems like orgy juice in those initial stages when your body is purging normalcy and zooming your consciousness onto another plane.

This was the state of affairs for some undetermined time, minutes, maybe hours, until all hell broke loose.