He was so jacked up that his creative ideas were blooming, being celebrated and then lost. As if his thoughts were passing him by. The only reason we jack is to find new things to explore in our own minds. Now he had to talk himself down.
“Like a flowing stream. Water. Sunlight. Burble. Flowing by. River of ideas. All passing without requiring action.”
It was better than the serenity prayer. Find the flow even in the chaos and rush of the cascading thoughts. Normally, he would be recording, writing, capturing, but this was not a normal moment. This was nothing but ennui. Boredom. Sleepless night. And experimenting with psyche-butter his Nana gave him.
“Too much,” he repeated. And then he switched the channel back to the stream. It was his happy place. Probably from prep school in Maine when he was a sophomore. The river. The woods. Massive woods. Miles and acres of woods. Deep enough to lose a student once in a while. It wasn’t like the townies were friendly or anything. They were not.
“Water. Flow. River of thoughts. Breathe. Notice the sunlight sparkling on the stream. The clear cold water. The smell of buring leaves. End of March heading into the most beautiful time of year.”
The idea was gone. It was some architecture of poetry or language or code. It was beautiful. Illuminating. And in the flash of awareness (genius moment here) it slipped through and was gone. Easy to tell you now. But the escapist fantasy was lost. No breakthrough ideas. Mood enhancers ingested, unstable, too strong. He was going for lift not a high. The microdosing experiments had been going well. This morning was a touch too much. In his coffee. Mixing the meds with the acceptable addiction was an idea. He’d just overshot his goal.
So, tap tap tap, jacked. Ideas, rivers, stars of light reflected directly into his corneas. Mesmerizing. An oncoming classic migraine headache? A stroke, seizure, malady of his advancing age. Busted afternoon.
“Fuck, I was ready to really let it out on the rock opera today.” Nobody was listening. His cat had died years ago, when he was still married. Seemed like all his girlfriends after that time were allergic. A dog or two, but no cats. He missed Peter Lake, the cat. All the journeys they had been on together. He was irritated. Dogs are cool and all, but not very mindful. A zen monk cat named siddhartha was certainly in his future. He might have to lose the girl. Feel the pain. Write some more hit songs. It’s always easier to write the breakup sad symphonies. The “She was just seventeen” songs were harder to come by. Today would not be a day of song. He noticed the paranoid creeping in slightly.
“Lost my job. Fk. We’ll get there. Stay positive. Stay…”
River. Water. If he could imagine the sound. The excitement. He was 15 years old and in love for the third time that year. Love was the drug that was not for sale. Sex, yes. Ecstatic love? It was a bit like experimenting with microdosing. You think you’re on a path of enlightenment, you over shoot, and wind up in a mental hospital. This was not good. Settle. Settle. Don’t freak out. Nothing to worry about, just ideas, fears, bad dreams. Yes, they were telling you something. Not predictive. More generative. Like *ai* of the early 2020’s. Math and patterns and chats. Seemed like a good thing at the time. Not the moment before the xxx (REBOOT here: tie back to the narrative structure of DAA and the Artifact.).
