majapanix
Rising Star
Note: post below is about my fictional character 'X'.
Where was the first mistake X made? At what point did he lock onto the tracks which took him to this strange town?
Oh yes, maybe the beer. Maybe the eight pints. Or the friend and his MD, so generously donated to the cause. It felt like the stuff actually worked again, after so many times. Euphoria bubbled up from thick alcoholic depths. The other people in the bar initially gave them a wide berth, but they were friendly types, and conversation flowed like beer, and vice versa.
Somewhere along the line Y came back to X’s home. He was an old friend X hadn’t seen in four years, and someone who had introduced X to DMT twelve years ago, which, having sat in Y’s cupboard for a year, failed to induce anything but swampy breath and a pub-attuned afterglow.
Beds had been set up downstairs, two a.m.
‘Great idea, Y, let’s do mushrooms, 3g each should be a good enough dose to take us to the edge, but not over it’.
Carefully, carefully: weigh, drop, weigh.
Mouthfuls of vinegary mushroom cardboard. The pair kept chewing and sipping (really, don’t drop them).
Then a forgotten gap. Sitting around, they talked. This should be pretty good, they said. X gets up to go to the toilet. Pissing, he sees the bathroom encased in the tryptamine lattice. He walks back to the front room. The pitch is going up. The volume is going up. He looks at the laptop, which he was trying to plug in to watch ‘The Holy Mountain’
‘I have to turn the lights off, NOW, silent darkness’.
The lattice spreads over everything as he sits. The fireplace opposite wraps around itself. High frequency tweaking across milliseconds, but how can distance equal time? These ideas roll themselves into a careening pinball. Unmistakably, the eternal unfolding-flower-gate opens. X has a season ticket now, apparently. Wai…..
Lost. Lost in hyperspace. There is a confluence of great forces above X. Unfathomable mountain beings. Gods – or businessmen – of some extra dimensional place, who have come here to attend to very slow moving, but diabolical, intrigues. Is this what this (reality) is? All these layers? How come we have no f**king idea about ninety percent of what is being organised in this place?
So. Forget about philosophy. Science. Mathematics. Computers. The Turing Test, Wittgenstein, McKenna, Jung, Feynman, The Marx Brothers, Chemistry, Quantum Physics, Artificial Life, Campbell, Nanotechnology, Many Worlds, (did I say McKenna?). All no more than vague gestures in the general direction of That Which Cannot be Codified, and hence is indescribable.
There’s definitely something science fiction about this place.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?
None of it means anything. None of it relates to this place at all. X cannot draw this. X cannot describe this. Enunciate, elaborate, elucidate, or hint.
YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE. YOU CAN NEVER UNDERSTAND
Lost in the soup. Two flavours: Noodle or Primordial?
Croutons?
(Wait, cheese is bad. Hang on – this is not changa)
Some still images are arranged like a four or five dimensional photo album, slipping about randomly. Except one. One blue picture that is important. A message comes to X: Follow the blue picture. The picture drifts down, down. Then starts from the top. Round and round we go. Follow the picture. Follow the picture. X follows, he knows he has an important task. The picture means something. That something is: ‘fireplace’.
X sits up. He looks across the living room at the fireplace. He takes a deep breath.
‘Y, are you ok?’
Y murmurs.
X sits back and closes his eyes. Deep, deep back into the pixellated folds. He remembers nothing more except:
(Voice) EXPLAIN WHY ARE YOU HERE?
(X) Umm, umm, let me jus… I know it’s… hang on… (can’t find the words, what was my excuse?)
(Simultaneous Cacophony of Voices) EXPLAIN! WE DEMAND TO KNOW! YOU MUST DECIDE! NOW! MUST TELL US! WHAT IS YOUR EXCUSE? MAKE A DECISION! YOU MUST ACT! WE NEED YOUR FREE WILL! TELL US THE REASON! EXPLAIN YOURSELF!
X gets stuck between breaths and beats. His body is almost imperceptibly alive with oscillations; the fibrillating waves that enable periodicity in the body’s motor functions. Here, between breaths and beats, as time grinds to a halt, X is on a knife edge. And he still can’t remember his excuse.
(X) No…really. I must explain, I have a reason, a GOOD reason, to be here, please understand, it’s… it’s…(um)
X sits up and takes a deep breath. Opposite, the fireplace smiles.
‘Y, are you ok?’
X is out of h-space. He swears a lot. He wonders if that is how strong Ayahuasca is. Did he just get the small psilocybin-rich ones? He stumbles about. The CD player is not playing ball. His phone display is needlessly fractal. Shpongle comes on, but it’ll wake the house up that loud.
X talks a lot. Y doesn’t say much. Eventually they sleep.
The next few days, X doesn’t feel too bad. But he knows he crossed a line. You don’t want to go to hyperspace after a lot of beer. The door is open, but the residents frown on drunks, and they have infinite ways of kicking you out.
Twice in the next week, X has flashback experiences. After a lifetime of small scale journeying, this has rarely happened. Once, watching a child play football, the scene is overlayed with hyperspatial analytics and extra dimensions, for a split second. Secondly, in his sleep, he sees a tree in hyperspace, lustrous and luminescent. But it is clearly recalled from a deep dream.
X thinks he was close to a legendary hyperspace butt kicking and has learned a valuable lesson in humility. Deep learnings. He wishes it wasn't so bloody alien.
Lucky for X, despite the madness, he enjoyed it in an odd way. Maybe it was that MD.
---------
Majapanix
Where was the first mistake X made? At what point did he lock onto the tracks which took him to this strange town?
Oh yes, maybe the beer. Maybe the eight pints. Or the friend and his MD, so generously donated to the cause. It felt like the stuff actually worked again, after so many times. Euphoria bubbled up from thick alcoholic depths. The other people in the bar initially gave them a wide berth, but they were friendly types, and conversation flowed like beer, and vice versa.
Somewhere along the line Y came back to X’s home. He was an old friend X hadn’t seen in four years, and someone who had introduced X to DMT twelve years ago, which, having sat in Y’s cupboard for a year, failed to induce anything but swampy breath and a pub-attuned afterglow.
Beds had been set up downstairs, two a.m.
‘Great idea, Y, let’s do mushrooms, 3g each should be a good enough dose to take us to the edge, but not over it’.
Carefully, carefully: weigh, drop, weigh.
Mouthfuls of vinegary mushroom cardboard. The pair kept chewing and sipping (really, don’t drop them).
Then a forgotten gap. Sitting around, they talked. This should be pretty good, they said. X gets up to go to the toilet. Pissing, he sees the bathroom encased in the tryptamine lattice. He walks back to the front room. The pitch is going up. The volume is going up. He looks at the laptop, which he was trying to plug in to watch ‘The Holy Mountain’
‘I have to turn the lights off, NOW, silent darkness’.
The lattice spreads over everything as he sits. The fireplace opposite wraps around itself. High frequency tweaking across milliseconds, but how can distance equal time? These ideas roll themselves into a careening pinball. Unmistakably, the eternal unfolding-flower-gate opens. X has a season ticket now, apparently. Wai…..
Lost. Lost in hyperspace. There is a confluence of great forces above X. Unfathomable mountain beings. Gods – or businessmen – of some extra dimensional place, who have come here to attend to very slow moving, but diabolical, intrigues. Is this what this (reality) is? All these layers? How come we have no f**king idea about ninety percent of what is being organised in this place?
So. Forget about philosophy. Science. Mathematics. Computers. The Turing Test, Wittgenstein, McKenna, Jung, Feynman, The Marx Brothers, Chemistry, Quantum Physics, Artificial Life, Campbell, Nanotechnology, Many Worlds, (did I say McKenna?). All no more than vague gestures in the general direction of That Which Cannot be Codified, and hence is indescribable.
There’s definitely something science fiction about this place.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?
None of it means anything. None of it relates to this place at all. X cannot draw this. X cannot describe this. Enunciate, elaborate, elucidate, or hint.
YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE. YOU CAN NEVER UNDERSTAND
Lost in the soup. Two flavours: Noodle or Primordial?
Croutons?
(Wait, cheese is bad. Hang on – this is not changa)
Some still images are arranged like a four or five dimensional photo album, slipping about randomly. Except one. One blue picture that is important. A message comes to X: Follow the blue picture. The picture drifts down, down. Then starts from the top. Round and round we go. Follow the picture. Follow the picture. X follows, he knows he has an important task. The picture means something. That something is: ‘fireplace’.
X sits up. He looks across the living room at the fireplace. He takes a deep breath.
‘Y, are you ok?’
Y murmurs.
X sits back and closes his eyes. Deep, deep back into the pixellated folds. He remembers nothing more except:
(Voice) EXPLAIN WHY ARE YOU HERE?
(X) Umm, umm, let me jus… I know it’s… hang on… (can’t find the words, what was my excuse?)
(Simultaneous Cacophony of Voices) EXPLAIN! WE DEMAND TO KNOW! YOU MUST DECIDE! NOW! MUST TELL US! WHAT IS YOUR EXCUSE? MAKE A DECISION! YOU MUST ACT! WE NEED YOUR FREE WILL! TELL US THE REASON! EXPLAIN YOURSELF!
X gets stuck between breaths and beats. His body is almost imperceptibly alive with oscillations; the fibrillating waves that enable periodicity in the body’s motor functions. Here, between breaths and beats, as time grinds to a halt, X is on a knife edge. And he still can’t remember his excuse.
(X) No…really. I must explain, I have a reason, a GOOD reason, to be here, please understand, it’s… it’s…(um)
X sits up and takes a deep breath. Opposite, the fireplace smiles.
‘Y, are you ok?’
X is out of h-space. He swears a lot. He wonders if that is how strong Ayahuasca is. Did he just get the small psilocybin-rich ones? He stumbles about. The CD player is not playing ball. His phone display is needlessly fractal. Shpongle comes on, but it’ll wake the house up that loud.
X talks a lot. Y doesn’t say much. Eventually they sleep.
The next few days, X doesn’t feel too bad. But he knows he crossed a line. You don’t want to go to hyperspace after a lot of beer. The door is open, but the residents frown on drunks, and they have infinite ways of kicking you out.
Twice in the next week, X has flashback experiences. After a lifetime of small scale journeying, this has rarely happened. Once, watching a child play football, the scene is overlayed with hyperspatial analytics and extra dimensions, for a split second. Secondly, in his sleep, he sees a tree in hyperspace, lustrous and luminescent. But it is clearly recalled from a deep dream.
X thinks he was close to a legendary hyperspace butt kicking and has learned a valuable lesson in humility. Deep learnings. He wishes it wasn't so bloody alien.
Lucky for X, despite the madness, he enjoyed it in an odd way. Maybe it was that MD.
---------
Majapanix