Occasionally I am really taken
hold of by hallucinations, varying in degrees of lucidity. For
example, I was involved quite thoroughly by a particularly violent
one in which I was being sucked into the center of the Earth with
intense force. This caused me much physical pain as the layers of the
planet ripped and smashed me to pieces. It was also all understood to
be a punishment by the hand of an angry deity seeking revenge
against me for wasting the life He had been so gracious to have
granted. My screaming and writhing on the floor startled the patrons
of the coffee shop I was in at the time and, needless to say, I am
not allowed back in the establishment.
Other less wholly consuming
hallucinations manifest in temporary beliefs and dangerous notions
incompatible with the world. One I still have today but am slowly
being corrected on is that I am a citizen of the Earth, not of my
country. Or that God’s laws and Nature’s laws should have nothing
to do with the way we create or enforce Man’s laws. Or that an
individual is intrinsically valuable by being a living, breathing,
loving creature; rather than by their measured output within an
imposed system, which I have been instructed on and am being
instructed on everyday still are all silly, childish ideas. My real
bad hallucinations usually always have to do with a God or Godhead
despite my usually firm disbelief in anything of the sort or anything
mysterious and spooky, for that matter. Ghost stories are childish.
I work nights now and go to
school during the day. I think this is irritating those bad chemicals
in my head when I go a few days without sleep. My father died a month
or so ago and left the world much as it was before and that wasn’t
good for my head either. I am getting worse, but I am not very
worried about it because I am not a danger to anyone but myself so
far. By this, I must assume that the chemicals can’t be all bad and
may have some kind of redemptive property. This is more of a
feel-good theory rather than one backed up by a number.
I want to tell you some things
about a trip because it might shed some light onto the nature of my
bad chemicals. I was the victim of one of my strange attacks during
my wanderings in the woods of Billings, Missouri. I become
particularly susceptible to a few of my manias when I am in the
woods, especially unfamiliar, ugly woods.
I think it is also important to
note that when my mind weakens and I suffer an attack, I usually
revert back to beliefs I had as a child. I can only guess that that
is because all the ideas you have as a kid seem so absolute because
you are taught most of them by people who have really figured it out:
Grown ups. And crazy people are the ones in need of the firmest
footing in their lives. I went loopy and found a Christ in the woods.
My trip to Missouri was to see a
family friend’s family’s friends and to get a taste of that
family life in the Ozarks. The trip was really about this: Things
were beginning to become very calm here in the Salt Lake valley. I
was doing well in school, had a steady, well paying job, my mother
and sisters were climbing back onto the horse quite well five hundred
miles north, and my romantic life had stabilized. It was all very
awful business. I had to get away from it. I wanted to become less
obvious.
Billings and all five or six towns
sprawled around it were dead. The land was varying shades of brown,
burgundy, stone, and gray, accented only by maroon tangles of
serpents covered in spikes at the base of patches of swampy areas.
Large black piles of soot and cinder block littered all the privately
owned land. It seemed that the local custom of the locals was to burn
down the houses and homes when they outgrew their usefulness, then to
construct a modern version better suited to their needs ten yards
deeper into the property, retreating slowly from the road every
decade. Some kind of reverse miniature of Sherman’s March.
I felt a scale in my head tipping
much too far one direction and was afraid it might swing around
completely. I needed to reconcile myself with this horrible geography
somehow.
His appearance was a caricature. I
think you find caricatures of people more often when seeking out
isolated places..
He told me to call him by his
Christian name. That name was Butch Sutton. Not exactly a Matthew,
Paul, or Malachi. I never found a Butch in any of the holy books they
pounded into our heads back in Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School,
but it did seem right away to be a thoroughly Christian name, at
least in a sort of charming, vulgar, American way.
Butch was exactly what I needed
him to be. He was a hunter, a veteran, a wine connoisseur, and a
dancer. He told me of the deer, possums, buffalo, boar, and other
game that bubbled and churned over the land like divine infestation,
keeping him fat and happy and occupied through all four seasons. He
showed me pictures of his kills in an expandable wallet fold used by
most people to keep pictures of grandkids or troubled nephews in.
Butch told me this:
“Life feeds on life, my boy!
It’s ugly at first but we all have to face it.”
He told me of his time in Desert
Storm and his two dozen dead buddies, almost all of whom were brought
back to the states to be covered in wholesome American soil in
elaborate ceremonies with similiar if not the same eulogies declaring
each and every one a indispensable hero who had been dispensed with.
He told me how thoughtful that was of the boys up top to have done
that for them, seeing as how many of them first enlisted and sealed
their fate with the idea of fighting and dying for their native land
not gracefully stuffed into their heads. It was only fair to dress
them up and display them proudly if they weren’t shattered to
pieces (many were) before sticking them into their native land when
they had served their purpose, after they had served their country. I
couldn’t relate much. My father was denied serving because of his
bad hearing and my grandpa wouldn’t talk about his time in wars,
even though that was what he had made a fine career out of. My
grandfather is very well to do these days. “All life is suffering,
my boy!” What an eastern thing for a Christ to say, I thought.
He offered to take me down to the
local wine and spirits store in his ‘83 Chevy Pickup. Butch seemed
to enjoy my quirky company and had no idea that I was an unstable
young man. I could not refuse such a perfect opportunity to go wine
shopping with my personal Christ figure. In fact, it was better. We
went wine tasting.“If you like a man’s wine, drink Norton. It’ll
punch you right in the face and it’s made right here in this
beautiful state of ours,” He didn’t know I was neither from this
state nor did I find this land beautiful. Irrational seeds of doubt
in my savior were already being planted. “If you like a fruity,
more delicate taste, try this Gewurztraminer.” The silent attendant
at the counter poured us a plastic sample cup and he handed it to me.
I swished it around, furled my brow, feigning something like deep
complex study or solemn approval, and gulped it down, disorienting
myself and wetting the seeds gradually. It all tasted like wine to
me. After a litany of other bizarre french and german named drinks,
and after a long discussion with the attendant of the liquor store
about the degree of oak and toffee present in one or maybe all of the
wines for all I know, he settled on a glimmering bottle of a Riesling
variety which he assured me was perfect for catfish.
.After some wine, I felt as if
this might be the point that I’d either lose it entirely, or be
cleansed of all my bad chemicals and fly up into heaven with Butch in
his ‘83 Chevy, which was as good a chariot as any. But I knew that
I couldn’t do this unless he died for me. He was strong and I was
weak and if I was to get any redemption out of the deal, he had to be
killed. This is what they had taught me back in Our Lady about
redemption anyway. The scale in my head began to revolve slowly.
“You wanna know the secret to
happiness?” He asked. The pivot of the scale twisted in and
imploded within itself, and I was lost. With this inquiry, and my
increasingly strange connection to this backwoods, war hardened wine
expert turned subjective Christ, I lapsed into another bout of
insanity. The bad chemicals showed me their power over all.
I heard voices. All the voices of
world whirled around me. Or maybe they were standing still and I was
speeding by. Voices with hands and legs that reached out, grabbing
and kicking me as I went. Voices made of light casting no shadows but
still very real despite that real things cast shadows. Voices made of
colors, sweet smelling colors, colors that made their own music
separate but still the same as the attacking voices. The music was
low and foreboding, but shot up high and pristine and beautiful while
still resonating deep and profound in my body. My body was my soul
and my body was me and forever it will be. Waves of the voices came
and went as if they were sieging an ancient city, but came in, passed
through, and went on their way to oblivion very unlike a siege all
the same. I began to recognize patterns in the waves and winced with
each oncoming assault. Finally, a final wave of voice and music and
color and smell and sound came hurtling toward me. Coalescing into
one final booming voice that centered and filled the whole universe:
“You’ve got to dance.”
“...What?”
“You’ve got to learn to dance.
Find yerself a girl at bar or a pub and just ask her to dance. It
ain’t got nothin’ to do with masculinity er bein’ good in bed
er courtin’ her er nuthin’ like that. Yer young so ya gotta
dance. I find myself one time with a the most beautiful woman in
town, dancin’ and singin’ to some down to earth music right there
in front of her man cuz you know what? He ain’t no dancer. All
ladies wanna dance, so you just gotta be the one who will do it with
them. And a lil’ bit a wine don’t hurt.”
That was it. This was his
revelation. This was his sermon on the mount in all it’s great
golden glory, uttered once and reverberated across all of beautiful
green creation before ascension into the white, blinding beauty of
Heaven. That I needed to dance in order to please women, and that
being drunk while I did it was even better.
This brought me back to the world
in one final violent shove. It didn’t ease me back into reality and
settle me onto soft folds of cloudy relief from my insanity , but
rather into a painful clarity and resulting in stark remission from
my head sickness, knowing everything that was a lie, whether it be
deliberate or otherwise, and knowing too well that I wouldn’t
recognize it for very long and that I had to escape before the
looming, unpredictable relapse. It hit me hard, deep in the core of
my gut and travelled along from the base of my being all the way up
the spine in a sickening pressure, escaped abruptly with a terrible
popping, groaning release out of seemingly the top of skull. I left
him alone on the pretext that I had a prior obligation and walked two
hours back to where I was supposed to have been all day, back at the
family friend’s family’s friend’s house. I shrugged off the
worries and scolding and began to pack my things. I don’t know if
it was to the family’s friend’s family’s friend’s dismay or
delight. I didn’t care. I just didn’t want to stay and look at
dead Earth anymore.
