Dating : My Utterly Hollow Existence

Why do I still ride around with the piece on me? It’s been two years, two fucking years, since I so much as even ingested LSD, let alone moved any weight. I keep the gun under my seat and I’m paranoid as fuck. This is a simple summary of my waking experience; I carry a firearm and I’m literally terrified.

A little bit about me — I work in an office. It’s air conditioned, slightly northwest of the Valley of the Sun. So you might, on the way to Vegas from Phoenix, spy a little complex of buildings; I’m in there somewhere, talking on the phone, developing business, generating revenue… how utterly mundane. I acknowledge this, it’s mundane, I agree.

Last night when I went to sleep I tried to reminisce and I tried to have some sort of moment; I was trying to, I don’t know, have an epiphany or a breakthrough or accomplish something with my character. Such are moments that people can have, transformations, like when you become a completely different person and you forgive yourself and you right all the wrongs and purify the karma and drift into some simpler, pure existence without any of the terror. This I tried to enact while I drifted off to sleep, staring at the ceiling. I couldn’t sleep; into the AM phosphorescence of the neighborhood I wandered, closing the glass door behind myself; I walked off my unbound patio and beyond the sidewalk into the dry and unimpressed desert; I walked there upon the ground with desert gravel beneath me, all of it resplendent in the bastard concomitance of the neighborhood’s halogens and a therewith mitigated moonlight. I’m so fucking upset, I’m so fucking insane; I’m so unwell, mentally.

Forgive me the self-deprecation; forgive my vulnerability, forgive everything I can’t utter to a single soul. Hold up, let me tell my boss, let me tell my dying mother — fuck it, I’ll call up my ex-wife — permit me the opportunity to explain them the absolute utter nightmare that I’ve constructed for myself in this life; let me go further eliciting forth their tears and explain my true conviction of existence as contrivance wholly and merely for my own penitence, the living out of an infinite sentence for some sin forgotten, for millenia unspoken; inexplicable, absurd.

Last night I walked in the desert. I looked at the ground, the plants. I had to take my phone and write my boss: Feeling under the weather, might not make it to work today. Will update you in the morning. And then I deleted the message and stood there in silence because I don’t have an excuse anymore and nothing’s even happening. I never sleep, I never sleep anymore.

Last night from my desert vantage I spent a lot of time thinking about the layout of the neighborhood; how it literally just mirrors the experiences of my life, each element of structure, the roads, the homes, the dystopian streetlights channeling their suppurant essence and yellowing all environs — how each moment in the plan and the structure of this intentional neighborhood mirrors a waypoint in my own destiny. And however I stood at each of these moments in my life determining neatly the next; the corner of a road with its lamp provoking homes and vehicles to regard it; my own disgust and blood spilling upon a pavement elicited endlessly by even my most timid glance. My life. The structure of my life and its ultimate intention and my laughable futility before it.

Well.

And notwithstanding such musings there in the desert last night, my mind performed its default function — incessant suicidal ideation. In my AM angst I visualized incessantly my hand conducting the pistol to my temple and my head exploding, by the trigger pull and report. I consider it honorable or deft or something my ability to literally carry a gun at all times and not kill myself, given the incessant ideation. I let the ideations run unabided; I stood with the pistol in my right hand and the phone in my left and with no shirt and in my boxers in the wee-morning heat; sweating; aesthetic; like that, self-aware, like that.

I reminisced. I tried desperately for an epiphany and transformation, for self-forgiveness. I viewed in my head on repeat the moment when I realized that everything is just completely, irrevocably fucked up. Absolutely fucked, that is. You won’t, given my voice, and more generally the iniquity of language, be able to feel the extent of my disconcertion; I recount nonetheless a moment whereafter I’ve not been able to unsee the nature of existence, my destiny (none of which should make any sense to you; I don’t expect it).

I’ll preface briefly in saying that I’m not here subscribing to traditional theories of trauma; I don’t believe that something happened to me or that I experienced something which I’ve hitherto repressed into my unconscious, afraid to reexpeerience or acknowledge (though I’m indeed afraid to experience or acknowledge; as if this weren’t already my waking existence, involuntary). Rather I’ve simply seen something which is unseeable, and which isn’t subject to extirpation. Trauma you can undo. This isn’t like that. For example, regarding trauma — maybe I got raped as a child; well, I was able to sort that shit out by bringing up the instance from my unconscious mind a sufficient number of times and living it, accepting it, realizing my worth, etc., dispensing with the character traits lent me by that instance, etc. Though what I’ve experienced, and which I fruitlessly recount here, isn’t something you can undo, remove, or obscure, or whatever — I mean I’m speaking I guess of existence itself, and my realization of it in a fateful moment — compromising this life, my identity, my emotions; everything, really; though it is everything, really, and I guess it’s my realization that everything is compromised, which is everything (my realization, that is). Now imagine this line of thought in your head at all times (if you’re not already just me and not already just the line of thought) and then maybe empathize a little bit, or try to, um I don’t know, strategize your way out of this incessant oppression. Where is my epiphany, personal transformation? Where is my happiness?

My psychologist never interrupts me here; I figure if anyone actually wanted a reality in which I could once again feel anything other than anguish I’d be admonished to stop expatiating. I appreciate a therapeutic strategy nonetheless, whatever he’s got in mind. He did tell me to stop reliving what I’ve come to call the realization of existence; though I emphasize, in utter terror (distrusting), with conviction, that it’s something out of my control, and merely aforesaid, destined, by all the agency of the universe. If I could work to stop its reproduction — well each attempt at cessation is its reproduction… this is presumably his point.

When I peddled LSD I would often just be on LSD; and I’m a chemist and at my current job I sell industrial lab equipment (like, very big equipment) which I’m familiar with. And on that fateful day seven years ago I stood smoking a cigarette on a dirt road in the rural Midwest, awaiting a shipment of equipment. The details aren’t seriously important. It was a clear sky, and there was a breeze, and I was alone standing off the highway where a road meandered down to a farm. We had a lab nearby, underground of course, where we synthesized LSD. And we collaborated with the proprietor of the neighboring farm; he received shipments of some of our lab equipment; the pretense that we strategized was that he needed the equipment for the refining of a particular mineral uniquely abundant on his land. It was all legit; we had him execute countless bureaucratic maneuvers, legitimizing the pretense. None of that’s really relevant to what I’m saying now. I would stand and receive the shipments on the side of the road and just pretend to be him and sign the papers; again this isn’t really important. It’s merely the context in which the obliteration of my psychology occurred.

We were in Oklahoma and sometimes I feel like Arizona’s just not far enough away.

I’d by then ingested LSD thousands of times (this is not hyperbole). Including the day in question, I’d been on LSD everyday for the previous several months. Obviously I’m going to have to explain what that is like, how it’s even possible. You begin to exist in a reality which has a different set of laws and permissions; your volition as cause results in different effects than would arise in the one I presume you to occupy now. Things are less discrete, and your consciousness floods the environment, and its own inexorable relationship with the unceasing flow of existence becomes the filter for reality.

So that likely means nothing to you. Also you can’t hide from anything and the only direction you can go is the one that you fearlessly intuit as your destiny, which will every second demand your concession. For those concerned, I was taking 12 milligrams (via water solution) at 6am (upon waking) and at noon everyday. I no longer hallucinated. It wasn’t recreational. I was living out the intentions of some divine task out of my control and which took on the character of a roller coaster which I couldn’t possibly jump from (except at the analogous cost of my life, my sanity, etc.). I’ll be brief — myself and my cohort were on a mission; for whatever reason we literally sought and intended the obliteration of the consciousness of our entire culture; we intended mass realizations of its ultimate futility, its grossly callous ethical framework; we visualized everyday ritualistically the dissolution of the mindsets lent the planet by government propaganda schemes. Literally. Every morning myself and the two others at the apex of this operation, solemnly and in silence, gathered in a circle and visualized the people of this planet undergoing radical disillusionment; the shattering of their identities, deracination of their fundamental beliefs — about who they are and their culture and purpose and meaning. We took as our religion and our sacrament the ingestion of LSD, and it was its production and dissemination that we took as the purpose of our lives, as our sacrifice; and accordingly everyday waking reality (normal reality, i.e.) in its three physical dimensions and sequential time arranged itself according to our visualizations and intentions in the sense that all the material and events about us were just the manifestations of our strict, inarguable intentions and efforts. From a completely other psychological territory we’d interface (like shamans) with everyday spacetime, in the form of, for example, processing untold quantities of lysergic acid amide; in the notation of our notebooks, whose precision echoed the industry of the society we sought to overturn; in the cutthroat psychopathy with which we ensured the efficiency of our supply lines, the unimpinged dissemination of our product to the unwitting masses — those minds whose overturning meant the overturning of the paradigm itself, everything we’d allied ourselves against and swore to, antagonistically, inflame at any cost.

Everything we’d visualized and intended from that mystic vantage was no longer occurring in the future but was rather each moment and every instance that we were then living; the visualizations corresponded directly with the reality that our agency in every moment produced; we had for inertia the unspoken intentions of an entire culture demanding liberation, freedom, enlightenment, happiness. We were channelling involuntarily the demands of an entire planet — I’m telling you shit got out of hand. We produced so much LSD.

When I stood in rural America that day with a cigarette in my mouth and the expanse of grassland forming the fundament of my consciousness, awaiting this delivery; mentally preparing to interface via social convention with its deliverer — I was struck by the nature of our endeavor.

Well I was struck by the nature of existence, disaffected thereby with the nature of all things — all things derivative of existence — and disaffected in particular with our endeavor in its precisely typifying literally all activity which has potential to occur.

It rose erumpent out of infinity, being infinity itself; and at that time in my life I’d naively, innocently, already aggrandized myself as having known everything there was to know, having seen all there was to see; I figured myself as joyous, participant to some greater scheme and framework of life. And yet here was a disclosure arising from within myself, and the environment in sync; physiologically my body assumed all the symptoms of panic — I was crying, hyperventilating immediately; my entire body vibrated imperceptibly at the frequency of pure terror. The composition of my cells by particulate matter all comprising strands of light vibrating intelligently into intersectional physical units all having for their basis the original hopeless and doomed intention to become something other than the one black infinity from which each derives; infinite attempts to become finite. Of course they’re fucking infinite (the attempts, that is; descry my own, endless, urgent so long as I experience, am conscious, forever) — and my precise recognition that each moment ever and not necessarily especially but especially my own which I’d been intending and visualizing which had to do with society and some godless aspiration to realize god for everyone with the dissemination of this bizarre instrument of sight, this apostate means of seeing (the LSD) — this being yet another attempt by someone or something or just the one unified god itself to realize itself and become liberated — in the same way that each of us as individuations (of infinity) lives this society and creates this society with an aspiration for one simple escape where all things assume unity and brilliance and perfection and we’re granted the singular knowledge of silence; we seek endlessly ignorantly happiness and enlightenment and coincidence with absolute values and somewhere then at that moment in my life with this profound disillusionment I knew the complete absurdity of any endeavor whatsoever but theretofore somehow missed the absurdity and sinfulness of my own, which like the rest of the universe sought impossibility — in the form of enlightenment for all the planet; and here I was faced with reality itself and infinity itself which in each of its formulations and distortions was just attempting to escape itself and be free and simultaneously realize itself in the form of enlightenment and it’s that that completely paralyzed me, paradoxical with the motion of my hyperventilation and my collapsing on the side of the road; and it was then that I was afflicted with but more appropriately made aware of the condition which we’ve all attempted with this illusion of life to obscure and prevent which is this: a fear of being fearful, yes, and the desire to be free of desire, obviously problematic in their self-perpetuation, and inextirpable in their forever deferring the enlightenment they so (hopelessly) lust.

I thought, maybe it’s the acid, so I conspired to never ingest it again; and yet I tell you here I am years later and my every waking moment is tinged with this attempt at happiness or simply to feel fucking normal, which is itself the very thing preventing any sense of normalcy; not to mention my conviction of the actual impossibility of joy, etc., the diagnosable mental illness; the anxiety constricts my veins and the blood of life circulates with arrant reluctance.

I want at any cost and any effort to unexist. I do forget at work, I do forget when I grip the piece and stare from my windows and imprecate my own future.