Journey to the Center of Reality
Dec. 8th, 2014 01:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonSkinny Puppy rolled into Terminus on the same night a Krampus flash-mob pub-crawled its way across Vampire Country. Not me. I was 90 minutes south by Greyhound and another 30 minutes south by car. I was on a vision quest to the center of reality, one that could be navigated sober of all influences save, sadly enough, the Nicotine Djinn.
And the reality of it was that I had a great time.
If anything it wasn't that I felt some sort of clarity of thought more leaden than usual, but I did notice I felt things more acutely. Reading of a great friend's troubles I didn't register a nagging ache at the back of my reflections but the full strength of a monstrous gravity at a center that for once wasn't within the head but the heart. The same with my father's birthday, which falls now upon the time of this writing.
On the other hand the simple joys of coffee and breakfast with my girlfriend resounded with a happy immediacy instead of filtering through the filters of abstraction.
Admittedly, the only time I wish I was high was when we watched the Lego movie together... but I imagine that's a temptation that's registered on even the most casual enthusiast of THC.
In that time with her not once was I haunted by the grudges that cannibalize my thoughts. I walked free of mind on a rainy day down on Flannery O'Connor's farm. The rusted farm equipment in the drizzle, the ramshackle sheds with drafts patched up with old newspaper articles. Fingers drifting along the sealed up fireplace, the frames of the doorways built for smaller men than me, along the window frames, trying to touch where she touched. Looking for a primitive and sympathetic magick straight out of the pages of Frazer's 'Golden Bough'.
But if you're looking for sympathetic, magick or otherwise, Ms. O'Connor is the wrong place to look. However, though I failed to find a phantasmal insight, I was given a sort of surface insight to an artist whom I admire greatly. Twenty four hours later, reading one of her short stories on a Greyhound back to Terminus, and I could see the tree lines that echo through her pages, the porch is no longer a memory flash out of a high school slide show on the Antebellum South.
When I arrived back in Terminus it was after fighting for my seat with passive aggressive elbows and pushes against a passed out Vet. One block deep into the city straight off the bus and I'm followed by some wino-ghoul shouting at me for three blocks in demand of a cigarette. Such are the demands of the Nicotine Djinn. Still, I managed to keep a good half-block distance between us while snapping off shots from my phone of various murals, tags and dusk lit alleyways. Only by wading through a current of flowing traffic did I lose him as well as my chance at a shot of a man in a fez smoking a cigar and addressing the clear sky above.
Now, at the end of a weekend that seemed as long as a week and yet nowhere near long enough, I retire from my fast preparing now to voyage back into my introspective vice.
And the reality of it was that I had a great time.
If anything it wasn't that I felt some sort of clarity of thought more leaden than usual, but I did notice I felt things more acutely. Reading of a great friend's troubles I didn't register a nagging ache at the back of my reflections but the full strength of a monstrous gravity at a center that for once wasn't within the head but the heart. The same with my father's birthday, which falls now upon the time of this writing.
On the other hand the simple joys of coffee and breakfast with my girlfriend resounded with a happy immediacy instead of filtering through the filters of abstraction.
Admittedly, the only time I wish I was high was when we watched the Lego movie together... but I imagine that's a temptation that's registered on even the most casual enthusiast of THC.
In that time with her not once was I haunted by the grudges that cannibalize my thoughts. I walked free of mind on a rainy day down on Flannery O'Connor's farm. The rusted farm equipment in the drizzle, the ramshackle sheds with drafts patched up with old newspaper articles. Fingers drifting along the sealed up fireplace, the frames of the doorways built for smaller men than me, along the window frames, trying to touch where she touched. Looking for a primitive and sympathetic magick straight out of the pages of Frazer's 'Golden Bough'.
But if you're looking for sympathetic, magick or otherwise, Ms. O'Connor is the wrong place to look. However, though I failed to find a phantasmal insight, I was given a sort of surface insight to an artist whom I admire greatly. Twenty four hours later, reading one of her short stories on a Greyhound back to Terminus, and I could see the tree lines that echo through her pages, the porch is no longer a memory flash out of a high school slide show on the Antebellum South.
When I arrived back in Terminus it was after fighting for my seat with passive aggressive elbows and pushes against a passed out Vet. One block deep into the city straight off the bus and I'm followed by some wino-ghoul shouting at me for three blocks in demand of a cigarette. Such are the demands of the Nicotine Djinn. Still, I managed to keep a good half-block distance between us while snapping off shots from my phone of various murals, tags and dusk lit alleyways. Only by wading through a current of flowing traffic did I lose him as well as my chance at a shot of a man in a fez smoking a cigar and addressing the clear sky above.
Now, at the end of a weekend that seemed as long as a week and yet nowhere near long enough, I retire from my fast preparing now to voyage back into my introspective vice.