It's supposed to hurt, I think.

Space travel, I mean.  There's no friction to tear at the body.  The ether neither helps nor hinders as we slip between stars.  Rarely, and growing rarer, are the delicate tugs of gravity wells.  Gentle enough, like a new lover guiding me to bed.

Our minds, however, meet with some resistance.  The chymical sleep slows the very clockwork of my cells and the researchers insist that I could sleep until forever ends, if I wished.  I had laughed and insisted there were less expensive ways of accomplishing that, if I wished.

They chymical sleep doesn't seem to stop the mind.  I am hesitant to say my mind is awake.  Yet it is not what I remember of dreaming.  And all the time...this tearing sensation.  There is a substance to my mind and whatever that substance may be it is scraping against the emptiness while my body glides fluidly past diffuse nebulae and remnants of supernovae.

The lack of scientific terms tempts me to think of a soul as it travels through Hell.  Except I don't recall the storytellers every describing Hell as quiet.  I suppose it could be that, too.  Silence.  Loneliness.  Not even a heartbeat for comfort.  No pulse in my vein reminding me of life.  Only the memory of life to trouble my thoughts until I awaken to the sting of a syringe and my destination.

I travel on and do not complain since I don't remember how to.  The void sips at me.  What the philosophers taught me to call the Self wisps away in eddies and swirls.  I travel on and do not fear.

When I awake, I suspect, the consciousness I return to will have no template in which to properly store this experience.  It will be reduced, contained, and shelved.  Perhaps at times I will recognize it long enough to regard it as a novelty, like the wax cylinders my father collected.  He would tell me of the symphonies they held within that he longed to share with me, if only there were a phonograph to play them with.

His regret was worth respect but I could only nod as we stared at the dusty, molding cylinders behind glass in the dining room we never used anymore.

The susurrus behind me is the only protest of discarded drafts.  I wait for it to fade like I always do.  And then it always does.

Sometimes I worry that I only write when I'm brooding.  So to dispel the myth that I am a swirling vortex of lugubrious energy with a dash of formal education, here's this.

Everyone is somewhere else.  They all are.  Every one.  Glittering jewels of binary code fall like rain and burst forth like geysers.  Everyone is awash in it; they clean their hands like plague flies and touch each others' faces like grooming chimps.

Everyone is like something else.  Everyone is congealing into something they remind one another of.

Now they all remind me of the same things, over and over.

Of course, it's entirely possible and probably probable that this is all in my head.

Still...everyone seems a little distracted lately.

Reading a lot lately.  Lying late in bed with a too-dim bulb of light until my arms ache and my collarbone screams at me to get out of that twisted, barely-supported homage to both the prone and the supine.  I'm a caterpillar turning up to a tempting branch but unsure, unsure, not all the legs let go.

Nibbling at the words.  Steady, I digest them.  And digested, they do give me a strength.  A strength fed by pulp novels and undisputed classics colliding in a cauldron of fusion and fission.  The product is not familiar to me.  I know it only as a vague, uneasy inspiration; all the art and beauty is work, a work, wrought and birthed, calculated from formulae on a clacking abacus and the exponential results swished on a slide rule.

I digest these things, lazy in my bed.  Suffering from the feast of words and not the twinge of any envy.

Now and then, a twinge of disgust as the clouds of industry part and I remember about that time that I was perfectly right about you. 

Memories have mouldered in the tin can of my mind. The years break against the beaches and erode, erode, erode. Sleep becomes less important because being awake is like being asleep. The ailments are remembered well enough that they are the background of every dream scene; the aches ebb and flow as the songs of breakers not far from the shuttered window, not far at all.

Blankets wrap me up and curl me into that little place, that space between the sea and the shore where one becomes the other and the other becomes something more. Pushing sparkling grains up and pulling them down again. It was all sea once. There was no sea once. Neither misses those times, I imagine.

I try to imagine.

It's a Tom Waits kind of evening: low and grey and hanging heavy on the floor like smoke from an arson fire. Seventeen ghosts lie on the floor and one more hangs from a bare light bulb in the ceiling. A mattress in the corner rests on a makeshift box-spring of paperback novels with the covers torn off. This town is the opposite of other towns; all the bars and clubs are open in the middle of the day and no other time. All our work is done in darkness and our celebrations are in light. Been here less than a year and I can't convince myself it should be any other way.

The town tucks in at sunrise for about 4 hours. Those that wish rise in the afternoon to cavort and laugh and frolic. The length of the festivities is not the measure, but the ferocity. These hours pass quickly and it is time again to rest. When the sun sets the town arises to industry. There are not many jobs here that a person cannot perform in low light.

Not all choose revel for their midday waking hours. Those that don't gather in crowds instead gather their thoughts. The people here are unlike any I've met before. Those who share my age have lived twice as many days; two mornings for each of my mornings and two nights for each of my nights. Mistakes are made, from minor to grave, the better part in daylight. The harm done overall is less, as I've observed, but truer, as there is no darkness to muddle the focus of passions and the intent of each flung emotion.

Poor Don Quixote. He keeps getting his ass handed to him. After a particularly sound thrashing he finds himself unable to get up and begins to recite dialogue from the books that inspired him to become a wandering knight.

I can relate to this.

I used to drink a lot. And often. It was the first year of college, after all. Not my first year of college, but someone's first year surely. There were many times where I drank too much. There were also several times when I drank waaaay too much. That I cheated death and came away with only the mildest of brain damage, I believe, was no accident.

In everyone's brain is a tiny little glass case containing a single brain cell. Etched into the glass case is "In Case of Emergency Break Glass". There is also a tiny bone hammer hanging next to it. The anatomists teach us that the smallest bones in the human body are the anvil, the hammer, and the stirrup located in the inner ear, but this tiny bone hammer is actually the smallest.

In my brain, that little bone hammer has long been worn down to the handle and tiny shards of glass are everywhere.

When I was drunk beyond all reasoning there was still this lone brain cell running around desperately trying to keep me alive. This brain cell was smart, though. It didn't try to run to the part of the brain that controls my heart, or my lungs, or tells my blood which way to flow.

It ran to my memory of the book Night by Elie Weisel. While my body was failing and I just wanted to curl up where I was and fall asleep, the emergency brain cell would send me the image of a starving Elie being forced to march through the snow while those who could not keep up were shot. I don't imagine my experience can compare to that nightmare, but it was enough to keep me from passing out long enough to make sure I was done being sick and had been able to at least keep down some water.

It is my hope that someday I will be able to draw inspiration from the suffering endured by others for something more honorable than staving off alcohol poisoning.

A boy can dream.

And then his friends burned Don Quixote's books! Jerks!


* * * * *

Google reminds me that is the birthday of Jorge Luis Borges. Love that guy. And he was a fan of Don Quixote. So there's that connection. That is cool. Books are cool.

Goodnight.