Meditations

Fountain-of-Consciousness

Weed

Whenever I tell people I’m sober, they always ask me, “not even weed?”, no, I hate weed. It was fun until that time when I was 16 and I got pistol whipped and robbed by somebody I knew and after that it just wasn’t much fun anymore. It made me paranoid. It made me eat Cheetos and play Grand Theft Auto while imagining that everybody I ever crossed or thought I crossed was lined up in a queue outside my house ready to get some getback and so I’d smoke cigarettes out on the back porch because you couldn’t shoot me in a drive-by if I was back there instead of out front. And so I’d sit and eat Cheetos and play Grand Theft Auto and think hard about every choice I’d made and how I’d let down my parents and how I’d let myself down and how I’d let down God and oh yeah how I suspected I was literally retarded but nobody had the heart to tell me the bad news. And I also suspected my friends were going to take me somewhere and shoot me the next time they said “hey, let’s roll to the store” or “hey, let’s go smoke a blunt” because I’d talked shit about them at some point and it got back to them and that’s just what happens when you have friends that collect guns. A friend of mine thinks weed is medicine that forces us to look at the shit we don’t want to look at, but the shit we always carry. It breaks all that shit up and brings it to the surface like a psychic plunger and sensitive people like us are supposed to work with that and turn the darkness into the light like some exercise in alchemy. He said he thinks weed opens portals to other dimensions. He thinks meth opens portals to other dimensions, too. But maybe that’s just a more creative way of saying “I experience mild psychosis every time I smoke a blunt.”

Computers

My friend and I were talking about the homeless that live in tents, RVs, smoke meth, smoke fentanyl and drag their belongings around with them all day in baby strollers and wagons, the kinds of wagons we used to have when we were kids. The type of street characters that are always hunched over, muttering, screaming, driven by internal stimuli that has seemingly nothing to do with the outside world or the people in it, only the world within their heads. At least it seems that way. But if you listen closely, there’s truth in the madness. There’s God in the Garbage. The things they say, the things they scrawl on walls and vending machines and spraypaint on sidewalks,

like these messages, brought to you by methamphetamine, a marker and a can of Krylon paint. He wants a one-on-one with a group that just won’t leave him alone. Just like the man outside the Safeway that told me the people in the RVs up the street wouldn’t leave him alone. He told me they were too scared of a one-on-one. He asked me what he should do, I told him maybe just drop it and wait for them to come to him instead because they clearly didn’t want the smoke. He told me I was wise, and so I gave him a smoke and then I left as soon as I could. Then there’s the complaint about the computer chips being installed in their brains. They’re only speaking in metaphor. Metaphor is symbol and symbol is the language of dreams and dreams are the language of the unconscious. Who doesn’t complain about the way computers control our minds these days? Who doesn’t complain about being watched these days? Who am I to say they’re crazy? They spend far more time outside than I do, and yes, touch much more grass.

Aqua Vivens

I read something last week. It triggered a memory. I read another something last week and it did it again. It brought me back a couple few summers. I was lying down with my eyes closed just seeing where the blackness would take me and it took me deep within myself, deep within the psyche in that place normally only accessible during sleep or that liminal space between wakefulness and slumber and I was in an underground cavern, and I went deeper, ever deeper until I saw vague silhouettes of marble statues and heard the sound of rushing water in this secret place hidden even from myself, this sacred place free from the zeitgeist of the early 2020s where everything felt decayed and rotten and stuck. The rushing waters grew louder and I finally came to its source and I could feel its currents running through me and the warmth told me this was what Heaven was. Eternal Life as Water that flowed Eternally, and Eternally through me. The sensations remained with me for the rest of the day, and it came back a week later when I opened Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy and came across sections on the living water and I felt that sensation all over again.

Jung, breaking linear time and traveling to the future, to those nightmarish years of our Lord just to lecture me in small print. Heraclitus said the world is a fire. But I don’t see it that way. What I saw was water.

Stella Maris

I’d been walking through the University District one morning on my way to work, trapped in a hostile inner world that projected and painted itself onto sidewalks, into messaging on walls and on vending machines and disheveled and psychotic people that would glare at me on the streets, all of those extensions of myself that I just didn’t want to look at and yet carried through life and through the desolate streets of Seattle in those dirty years of the pandemic when nobody else ever seemed to be outside but me. I’d been walking through the University District one morning on my way to work, stepping over yellow paint on the sidewalk, stepping over used condoms and garbage and burnt foil squares when I lifted my eyes from the ground and caught the sun breaking through morning clouds and in my mind’s eye I saw The Holy Mother in all of Her glory and though this lasted for only a split-second I knew what I saw and I knew it was going to be be alright. I knew She was watching over me, watching over you, watching over those hunched over junkies and those that live in RVs down the street from Safeway and watching over those that can’t handle their weed and watching over those imagined to be lined up in queues outside houses waiting to get some getback. Watching over all of us as we surf these ever-regenerating and Eternal currents of Life. Who needs weed. I don’t.