The Hitchhiker
Stood by the side of the road
And leveled his thumb
In the calm calculus of reason"
-Jim Morisson
"Thoughts in time and out of season
The Hitchhiker Stood by the side of the road And leveled his thumb In the calm calculus of reason" -Jim Morisson
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Bryce Canyon, UT.
The Garden of Forking Hoodoos. “Imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both the past and future and somehow implied the stars... I felt myself for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world." - JLB, The Garden of Forking Paths Squiggly swigging Squiggles's chemical script.
"The summer we were gobbling all of Squiggles's white blotter, we'd time our doses to hit at sunset. We'd kick back on the coppery cliffs of Red rocks beneath a hunchbacked pine and watch the sun melt into an immense, resplendant sea. The sky stuck the total chord of the spectrum, from the crimson lump of the slipping orb through the violet haze of the canopy above. And to the east lay the distinct boundary where dusk stopped and evening began to sketch the uncertain hieroglyphs of the stars." - Erik Davis Boom 2018 was the typical life-rippling festival it normally is. The Dance Temple was a sustainable architectural marvel — a sacralized psy-trance dance space fully equipped with a surround-sound of vortexing Fibonacci geometry and high-fidelity sub and infransonic frequency distribution — it was a perfect, vibrating audio-visual space-place psychedelically designed to be explored with playful, hallucinatory precision and transcendental tribal movement.
On the opening day I stumbled upon an interesting electro-chemical sensory experiment while entranced in a lovely, other-worldly synaesthetic atmosphere. I began—for some reason or another—blinking rapidly while swaying my head in the familiar looping figure of the infinity symbol. I found great hypnotic joy in the rapid, rhythmic blinking and fluidly looping head movement. This simple, repetitive action amplified the notion of the film of life running on a reel—the reality reel, revealed—so to speak. I would turn my eyelid-powered stroboscope on and off from Ott on Day 2 to Braincell on Day 7. The experience of this joyous perceptual experiment urged me to further explore the slightly psychtropic stroboscopic topic. I first explored and played with the word phonetically. In fact, it inspired a verse in "Cyclopsian Octopodes." Following the word play, etymological curiosity ensued. The word stroboscope is derived from the Greek, strobos 'whirling' and skopein ‘look at.’ Interestingly, my head was doing just that: whirling; while my eyes were looking at their Dance Temple surroundings through different shutter speeds. I literally transformed myself into a human stroboscope. Talk about Boom being a transformational festival. Certain sonic instances
have the peculiar proclivity of sending intricate electrical signals rippling through the network of the nervous system —sometimes-- significantly altering subatomic position along the anatomical way. The lonely lunar loon is alone on the only lagoon on Saturn’s second smallest moon. A stroboscopic black and cobalt solar eclipse skip skeptical sensors of skeletal creatures on a curious twinkling winter in Neptune. Cyclopsian Octopodes clandestinely clone themselves on Pluto. Perpetually tripling nanometre tentacles fractal off their tentacles' tentacles producing hexagonal batches of peculiar chemicals. What a May. Quite the mind-boggling May, actually. We ended up road tripping like Dharma Bums over 4,000 miles in, through, and around a dozen states, six National Parks, countless hours of scenic routes, and at least three State Parks. We were subsumed by nature and Her substances. Yogic hearts bowing in the presence of Her treasures: mountains, geysers, birdsong, bear, steam vents, hot springs, rivers, elk, marshes, meadows, canyons, lakes, lightning, winds, bison, valleys, gulches, foxes, forests, boulders, buttes, gulfs, streams, prairies, glaciers, swamps, chipmunk, marmot, squirrels, bubbling pools and mud volcanoes.
It's eleven-eleven-seventeen today, a sublime autumn day enlivened by the spirit of prime numbers--the atom-like building blocks of the natural numbers, as pointed out by the mathematician Don Zaiger. Zaiger further commented that "the prime numbers grow like weeds among the natural numbers...and nobody can predict where the next one will sprout...Even more astonishing...the prime numbers exhibit stunning regularity, there are laws governing their behavior, and they obey these laws with almost military precision." Whether these puzzling elementary numbers resemble random sprouting weeds or purposeful mushrooms ecstatically popping out of the mycelial matrix remains to be seen. In any event, prime numbers have fascinated mathematicians for millennia.
The legendary geometer Euclid of Alexandria, for example, may have been the first to prove that there are an infinity of primes well over 2,000 years ago. The Greek mathematician, music theorist, astronomer and poet, Eratosthenes, developed what is probably the original test for primality, now known as the Sieve of Eratosthenes around 240 B.C. Fast-forward over 2,000 years to 2008, the forty-fifth known Mersenne prime (prime numbers named after the French theologian and mathematician Marin Mersenne) was discovered, which contains an unfathomable 12,978,189 digits. We found ourselves in Playa del Carmen during the peak of bullshark mating season, so the obvious thing to do while in the area was to dive to a depth of sixty feet in order to observe a school of female bullsharks curiously encircle our vortex of bubbles. We were assured that, despite their notorious reputation, bullsharks were not as aggressive as the media have unfairly portrayed them to be. We were easily convinced and thoroughly thanked our guide, Ken at the Infinity2Diving SCUBA shop in Tulum for his charming persuasiveness after this unforgettable experience. I'd recommend this exhilirating diving excursion to anyone in the area during this majestic bullshark mating time. If you were offered a dozen drops of pure, lucid acid by a reputable Californian chemist at the Newark airport three hours before your flight to Amsterdam, would you consider counting the drops as they fall on your tongue? It wouldn't be ridiculous to presume that most people, when given the option, would prefer to avoid states of extreme paranoia like they would the Bubonic Plague. Why would any sane person select to sling themselves into an exasperated, wild-eyed, schizophrenic head-space? Especially in a frenetic, high-security place like an airport. Who in their right mind would willingly seek out states of extreme paranoia? Surprisingly, there are times when unique insight can be gleaned after getting through the inescapable fire that make your pupils bounce around.
In the video below, the legendary lyrical freak of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, recounts the time he dubiously took a scoop of frosting off of a big, beautiful birthday cake backstage before a performance. Moments after relishing in the frosting someone walks in to inform the people backstage that the birthday cake editors had 800 hits of acid dropped in the frosting. In the middle-late sixties Jerry no longer enjoyed performing while tripping ridiculously. It was no longer fun due to the fact that once the tripper is tripping, there is no button they can press to make the trip stop. The tripper is in it for the long-haul (Keep Truckin'). Jerry began to enter a steep, slippery state of unwarranted paranoia. As his surroundings started to distort and disintegrate into visions of liquid and auditory roaring the paranoid notion that the place was full of ill-intentioned mafia gangsters trying to kill him began to take root. As he and the members of the Grateful Dead were walking out on stage Jerry remorsefully realized that he was going to die. As he came to this ultra-paranoid realization, he thought to himself the only thing he can do at that point was to play for his life. So on that dreadful night he played for his life and to his confused astonishment the mafia gangsters decided to let him live! From that point on, anytime he questioned what or why he was doing what he did, Jerry would simply play for his life. Clearly, as this anecdotal evidence from a legend suggests, although extremely unpleasant, instances of extreme paranoia can be looked back on as animated life lessons. Despite how ridiculous it might seem to seriously consider the validity of paranoia (especially while in a dialogue with a schizophrenic), the exaggerated levels of these abnormal states of mind might offer us an experience that can be processed into elevated levels of understanding, empathy, motivation, even wisdom. These attributes can be invaluable tools for therapists, medics, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, and mental health assistants in the medical field, underground scene or at the festival scene (i.e. Kosmicare and Zendo Project). |
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