Reprieve From Exposure to Global Insanity

Sometimes you just need a break. Sometimes you need to get away from everything in a mental and emotional way that even geographic dislocations of the body cannot help. Sometimes you need to fly - which, as Douglas Adams defined, is 'the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing'.

I'd planned this weekend to throw myself at the ground and miss (In Guyana, it's Emancipation day and thus this qualifies as the weekend still). Until this morning, I'd been slamming into the ground repeatedly. It's a very bruising experience, and one which is most disturbing when one is bouncing between slams. It's called, "Oh, no, not again!" syndrome to unqualified psychoanalysts around the world.¹

In case you haven't figured this out, this is a pointless ramble. Or maybe because it appears pointless it has a point. Or maybe this is how Macbeth was supposed to be written, had Shakespeare been sober. In the end, no matter how much people say otherwise, I'm just a mammal with a growth at the top of my spinal cord, and an undernourished and inflamed public duty gland.

People try all sorts of recreational drugs - not counting aspirin - to attain the level of being that I feel right now. It's a complete disconnection with the world as I do not wish to see it. The world exists as a painting which my mind wanders around in, and nobody has the common decency to put up signs for all the wet paint.

There are periods in life - and there are exclamation marks, as well as commas and other literary paraphernalia that writers leave lieing about. And between these punctuations, there's supposed to derive some form of meaning - and the meaning is partially defined by the context of the larger writing as well as the punctuation. The last week, or perhaps weeks, have been a bit of a run-on sentence - enough so where I thought taking pictures of signs was interesting. Is that a sign of impending mental disaster? No, not really. Not unless you see butterflies or other things within the sign.

What's the point? The point is that everyone needs a break, and it's not only a person's right to claim it - it is the responsibility of people around that person to assure that they have it when they need it. This means not talking about things which they are taking a break from, and generally assuring that they do not decide to charge troglodytic mindsets with unripe bananas. There is a saturation point that should not be crossed, lest the saturee become overflowing with the same attitudes, emotions, and knowledge (or lack of said subject thereof) that are being shoved in. It's not a new thing. Ask Babbage. But then, when confronted by confusion at varying levels, it becomes quite tempting at times to simply give in to the unbridled confusion and idiocy and fit in, instead of being the bottle that people are trying to pump their confusion and idiocy into - possibly to see when the bottle breaks.²

Sometimes you need to pick between administrating yourself and allowing yourself a massage. The human body does amazing things under stress. It defies rest - a condition generally known as insomnia, and something which I had last week. I go through bouts of insomnia, and in small doses I consider it healthy for myself (though 9 out of 10 sleeping pill addicts disagree). Last week was a bit much. Every time I turned around, someone wanted something, or commented on something, or wished to extract a part of my left frontal lobe so that I would not be dismayed by what I was surrounded by.

So sometime last night, I crawled onto a bed and slept. Really slept. I slept without dreams, without concerns, and with no care for what happened to anyone. The correct term would probably be comfortably numb, where reality is as inconsequential as the fourth person of the opposite sex that you kissed.³ It's not a bliss. It's this feeling that nothing you can do can stop the world from it's descent into chaos, that you were there only to catalog some of the obvious information for others to look back upon and say, "Gee. We didn't see that coming!"

Sleep like that is a wonderful anaesthetic for the mind. The body, after a long period of revolt, goes into a period of shock - much like that feeling just as the airplane leaves the ground, where you have no weight and both the seat and the seatbelt have no purpose other than to be there when the moment passes. And when you awake, you still have that feeling. That disconnect. Like someone on LSD looking for orange juice, you do whatever you can to retain that disconnection with a reality that is supposed to be normal. The mind balks - what insane person in their right mind would go back to that?⁴

Or come back to this?

The ceiling holds a perverse fascination to the mind at this point - whether it holds the rain out or the sky out becomes a question. Whether it holds you in a reality for safety or it keeps you in a reality where your mind might feel safe becomes a question. Dancing around that, the birds twitter their delight in a quiet day where they can hear themselves sing, and the odd vehicle adds bass to their treble.

Someone went through a lot of trouble to keep the rain out, and to keep the sky out. It's the curse of the keyboard to be trapped indoors. It's the curse of an overtaxed mind to fear going outside lest one runs into people who want something. The email aggregates, the flow captured by numerous email filters that send words to different folders based on who wrote them.

I envy people who can do this on a regular basis. But the on-ramp for reality is about to reappear, and with it the knowledge that I won't stop for anything but urgent bathroom breaks for my mind, and fuel and maintenance breaks for my body.

It sucks being back. At least writing this made the transition more bearable. We now return you to the regularly scheduled altered mirroring of the world.

The mind slips from neutral as the engine revs. The hubs are locked. The cylinders fire at first like an internal combustion engine, then like a Wankel. The moment eddies as time is sucked in through the intake, accompanied by caffeine and oxygen. The spark plugs fire, all of them, with increasing amperage as the load increases. Hubs are locked, full 4 wheel drive is engaged. The clutch engages. The tires spin to warm, preparing for....?

¹Qualified psychoanalysts have all been indicted on multiple counts of inaccuracy, especially when attempting to miss the ground.
² Attempting to break the bottle through pressure of confusion and idiocy - from within - is recursively correct, and the writing of it was purely accidental. No bottles were harmed in this entry.
³ Got you thinking, didn't it?
⁴ No recreational drugs were harmed (or used, for that matter) in the writing of this entry.
⁵There is no 5, silly.