Another tired excuse for a day, its promise lost to an action plan left to sour on a street awash in soggy old calendars remaining from Time’s childhood. The day could be salvaged if enough optimism could be captured and used to feed additional attempts; more energetic than the stuff chat clogged the lines that fuel the machinery of progress.
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During one of my recent transitions from conscious awareness to the incoherent confusion that precedes sleep, I envisioned myself being swept along inside a large, dark tubular tunnel. The inside walls of the tunnel appeared to be composed of a flexible web-like membrane, bathed in dim, iridescent, lime-green light. Everything else was empty black space. I remember thinking I had somehow entered the tube from the “wrong” end, which I took to mean I had been effectively sentenced to experience life in reverse order, a condition I could not escape. The meaning of that odd realization, if it ever had meaning, has since been lost to me. But since having that mental experience (and beforehand, I believe), I have seen graphic depictions of artists’ concepts of spacetime wormholes. Those representations closely resemble what I “saw” while crossing between consciousness and its strange, pre-sleep companion state. Since that bizarre flight of fantastical imagination, I have experienced more mundane—but similarly bewildering—dreams that dredged up and heightened my distaste for people whose arrogant behaviors I found contemptible. Those dreams were too complex and too upsetting for me to attempt to describe; trying to do so would be a pointless exercise in frustration. My recollections are sufficiently irritating without adding to them by meticulously reconstructing them.
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Attacking other nations and kidnapping their presidents are the pastimes of idiots and criminals. A suitable response to such actions might appropriately involve a crushing rebellion against the perpetrator of the crime and his enablers. There is a point beyond which terrified acceptance of the dangerous delusions that prompt such madness is utterly intolerable. Blind rage, accompanied by a willing and forceful abandonment of compassion for the aggressive bad actors, may be justified in such situations. Not only justified, but demanded…perhaps.
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The psychological pressures in his mind seem to increase exponentially with almost every passing hour. The causes of his distress can be tracked back to the deterioration of the human condition. The fact that he is not alone is of no consolation. In fact, that reality worsens the sensation…drowning in hundreds of pounds of microscopically fine powder that’s miniscule in particle size and hotter than the sun. He can feel the bones in his skull begin to flex and stretch like a balloon. Hairline cracks may not provide enough warning of an impending eruption. The speed with which the fissures form may be too great to detect a catastrophic explosion early enough to escape its apocalyptic impact. In advance of the detonation, though, and immediately after it occurs, an overwhelming sense of calm will envelope this universe and the ones just beyond the reach of the cataclysm. When the latex skin of the balloon begins to wrinkle in anticipation of the event, the magma at the center of Earth will vibrate in joyous anticipation. Liquid rock will spill forth from the core, covering the planet with a searing mist of molten material that will enshroud the planet with a granite crust. These images did not arise out of emptiness. They were taken from a camera’s lens; a finely polished glass disc that captured as visual experiences his interactions with the ashes of compassion. Sympathy, in that universe, is mocked by strands of hostility, woven into every piece of rough, biting fabric that shreds skin in much the same way hate shreds the soul. A fictional treatment of overwhelming fear.
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Sleep may have become a symptom of depression or, at least, a temporary analgesic for anxiety. Rather than waking refreshed, I stumble into the morning feeling like I faced a cheering arena crowd offering congratulation to the bull after I lost another fight. Or maybe I just need a lot of sleep to help replenish energy diminished by eating too little and failing to consume enough water. I will conditionally surrender; I will exchange some of my unwanted wakefulness for a cookie or two and some more sleep.
